alt Hacker NewsI’m completely ignorant about this and likely just missing the point but: isn’t the point of an OS to not have to (vibe)code filesystems and networking by hand every time you need them? Also, how does a unikernel cooperate with other applications? Would they all live in separate networked unikernels managed by a hypervisor? And, if they all (vibe)coded their own fs and network wouldn’t that introduce subtle bugs and inconsistencies that would eventually bring the whole thing down and lead you back to the need for shared primitives in the first place?
Maybe a good halfway point is to still have a unikernel but the libraries for common stuff like networking or fs are already written according to a standard and plug and play and reusable across applications?
Replies
Unikernels simply redraw abstraction boundaries. You can still use libraries and third-party code to implement common primitives. In fact, that's exactly what many unikernel frameworks give you (unikraft, hermit, mirage)
You don't build the networking or filesystem by hand every time you need them. You pull them from reviewed and maintained library code from a repository. That's how MirageOS etc work. Someone else has written e.g. TCP/IP -- hopefully well -- and you link against it.
The point that makes this different from an OS is that there's no shared service, no syscalls to do that stuff -- just subroutine calls -- and no timesharing (except at the hypervisor level). It's just a single runtime running on hypervisor direct against the virtualized hardware.
Because, yeah, all this work has happened in hardware in the last 30 years to make that possible, but we still treat the operating system as the best unit of resource sharing. When in fact it's kind of a jack of all trades master of none. If you're booting a whole linux kernel -- with its giant framework built to co-tenant a pile of applications and users -- just to run one process, there's definitely something to look at there. Even if the unikernel space itself is relatively immature.
You don't need to emphasize the "vibe coded every time you need them" thing. That's not what anybody was being talked about in the article. The "vibe coding" piece is pointing out that the missing pieces in the ecosystem can be more rapidly filled in now because of agentic tooling.
I guess the others have made these points, but since unikernels run in VMs with virtual hardware, I guess a virtual ethernet card can have an interface that's easy to program for, making the driver trivial. You're not talking to real hardware in any case.
Similarly, a filesystem's just a data structure that happens to be on disc. You can mmap your harddrive and let the host hypervisor handle swap, preemption etc.
It's similar to a process contract, but with slightly different boundaries