Docker bags unikernel gurus – now you can be just like Linus Torvalds

Enter Docker

After Docker took existing and esoteric technology – Linux containers – and made it user friendly, Unikernel Systems hopes the Silicon Valley biz's magic will rub off on the library OS model. The Cambridge team hopes they will, together, be able to find a way to build, deploy and manage unikernel apps using simple commands just like the Docker suite manages containers, hiding away all the fiddly technology we've just spent the past 1,400 words explaining.

In return, Docker will get access to a team of operating system gurus, who will help build out the platform, allowing software to run all sorts of machines and gadgets from Linux and Windows servers to bare-metal hardware and the Internet of Things. Terms of the acquihire – particularly how much was paid – were not disclosed.

Unikernel Systems certainly caught Docker's eye at DockerCon Europe last November. Back then, the UK team demonstrated using Docker's software to spin up a bunch of unikernels, each one in a virtual machine on the KVM hypervisor, to run an Nginx, MySQL and PHP stack: each program ran in a unikernel address space. Crucially, the team used Docker tools to configure the network of this nano-cluster, getting the interfaces talking to each other.

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There's also a big community of developers surrounding Docker and its open-source software, and Unikernels Systems hope at least some of those people will get stuck into the unikernel model and help grow it into something robust and ready for production.

There are plenty of unikernel designs out there, one of them being MirageOS, whose core team includes Unikernel Systems staffers and is led by CTO Anil Madhavapeddy. That particular software, written using Ocaml, emerged in 2009.

Run the clock backwards to the late 1990s, and you have Nemesis – an experimental operating system developed by the University of Cambridge, UK, with help from the University of Twente, Netherlands; the University of Glasgow, UK; the Swedish Institute of Computer Science; and Citrix Systems. The OS tried to do as much as possible in user space, pushing a lot of kernel functionality into shared libraries, and leaving little in the privileged kernel space except the bare minimum to run the system.

In a chat this week with The Register, Madhavapeddy joked that the bottom half of Nemesis – the kernel space – became the widely used Xen hypervisor, and the top half – the kernel-as-a-library scheme – is only now emerging as a mainstream design.

"After 15 years, it's good to see some of this hard work in Nemesis appear," he said. "Now every developer can build a unikernel. Docker makes Linux containers so easy, and we want that for unikernels."

Madhavapeddy explained it should be possible to develop, build and test unikernel applications in a familiar development environment by linking against libraries to run the code on an underlying kernel – and then link with the unikernel libraries when it's time to test and deploy on a hypervisor or bare metal.

"With Docker integration, the developer will never have to understand all the details of technology," he added.

David Messina, veep of marketing at Docker, told us: "We hope this collaboration will drive activity around unikernels, and make them more mainstream. This is the early stages, and we are bringing the technology into the Docker project and the Docker engine.

"We hope people will get a feel for it. So much of what we do is community based; we're expecting enthusiasm from developers, and a bunch of new ones from the community to join the effort."

We're told Unikernel Systems team will continue to contribute to open-source projects, including MirageOS and rumprun. You can find out more about unikernels and OS design here. ®

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