Unikernels

Xen Project has been at the forefront of the birth of Cloud Operating Systems: specialized lightweight operating systems which are only intended to be used within a Virtual Machine. These Cloud Operating Systems may become the core of a new form of cloud, where a single hypervisor instance can support hundreds or even thousands of VMs.

Cloud Operating System List

The following Cloud Operating Systems are currently of interest to the Xen Project (though the list is not exhaustive):

• MirageOS, an official incubator effort of Xen Project, employs an OCaml-based kernel. See the Presentation.
• LING (formerly Erlang on Xen) creates an Erlang runtime environment. See the Presentation.
• HaLVM, the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine from Galois, allows you to run Haskell programs. See the Presentation.
• OSv from Cloudius Systems produces a Java environment. See the Presentation.