They only took, like, the network stack from Mirage. Their virtualization library is xhyve… well, turned into a library.
For instance, direct ports of unikernel projects to run against the HyperKit kexec APIs would be really fun. Any takers for MirageOS or HalVM? :-)
We've started keeping a list of "help wanted" issues for anyone interested in getting started with hacking in this area: https://github.com/docker/hyperkit/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...
However, we're committed to upstreaming patches to their relevant projects where relevant, and so the HyperKit Git repository is as close as we can make it. If it diverges a lot in the future with file renames, we'll have to figure out the Git-fu to make cherry-picks easier...