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:

• MirageOS, an official incubator effort of Xen Project, employs an OCaml-based kernel
• LING (formerly Erlang on Xen) creates an Erlang runtime environment
• HalVM uses Haskell
• OSv from Cloudius Systems produces a Java environment