alt Hacker News> running on hypervisor direct against the virtualized hardware.
Well, here is your actual OS then. You named it "hypervisor", and changed the system interface, but it's still there, revirtualizing the access to hardware and ensuring separation of different users/applications/unikernels.
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Yep. Except every application runs in a down-and-dirty virtual machine instead of a nice clean process, so they get to experience the joy that is hardware booting and get to configure virtual device buffers instead of calling send(). Progress.
I mean, sure we can put labels wherever we want. I don't really care. MirageOS even has "OS" in its name.
The point is all the other things: total number of lines of code, permissions and security, memory management, drivers, process mgmt, it all changes.
This isn't too dissimilar to DOS programs. DOS also gave you a filesystem, memory management, a shell a process loder, driver interface, but it was all in real mode, and you were free to replace these components with your own as you pleased.
Or if you're more familiar with embedded, like a BSP or RTOS