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Comment by umanghere | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be quite similar to the other unikernel that was posted recently [1]. It would be useful to have an in-depth comparison of these (and other) unikernels, especially with regard to performance and compatibility.

I can see that HermiTux has the ability to select only the syscalls needed by the embedded program, and to transform syscalls to function calls, which seems quite interesting.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25405672

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> transform syscalls to function calls

I thought that was kind of the point of a unikernel. Or am I mistaken? Does the other one from the other day not do that?

That's certainly part of the point (and probably one of the main performance benefits). However, even if this doesn't happen, a unikernel still gives the advantage that it's much more difficult to run undesired code and is likely to improve security.

https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv is an offshot of a project from ScyllaDB.

Bit of a nitpick, but from what I understand they were making osv and pivoted to ScyllaDB, correct?

I only know what the readme says.

> OSv was originally designed and implemented by Cloudius Systems (now ScyllaDB) however currently it is being maintained and enhanced by a small community of volunteers.

Yeah that doesn't sound conclusive in either direction -- not clear if they made this on the way to ScyllaDB. I took another look just in case and found a source[0]:

> After much research into the market and technology, in mid-2014 the team decided to pivot away from OSv (still a live project). Instead they decided to embrace the Cassandra architecture but rewrite it from scratch in native code with all of the know-how of years of kernel/hypervisor coding. This would become the Scylla database.

[0]: https://www.scylladb.com/company/the-scylla-story/

Correct. OSv came first, and then Seastar + Scylla.

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