Containers (docker/podman) are still not as secure as virtualization (qemu,kvm,proxmox)

Plus these might be smaller and might run faster than containers too.

It can be much faster, and much smaller surface area for attacks than using a full Linux kernel.

Presumably to avoid the cost of context switches or copying between kernel/user address spaces? Looks to be the opposite of userspace networking like DPDK: kernel space application programming.

anywhere you want hard isolation and only a subset of OS. especially multiple instances thereof.

so, generally at the edge (gateways, shims, protocol boundaries)

> Separation from the hypervisor kernel?

Not really. Separation from (type 1) hypervisor (or rather distrust of the host [0]) requires hardware support; ex: ARM CCA / AMD SEV-SNP / Intel TDX.

For separation from the supervisor, Android developed a peculiar approach in "pKVM" for ARM where the host (supervisor) is partitioned away from the guest [1].

Both those "separations" is not something Toro provides on its own; the Toro unikernel would totally be under the control of the host, from what I can tell. That said, what Toro (or any unikernel, really) does is reduce the attack surface area, as the (guest) supervisor is pruned to run just one particular application (more code to partition things up will eliminate a class of attacks but may result in new attack vectors [2]).

[0] ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678249

[1] Protected KVM on Arm64: A Technical Deep Dive - Quentin Perret, Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9npebeVFbFw (2023)

[2] Mitigations are attack surface, too https://projectzero.google/2020/02/mitigations-are-attack-su... (2020)