OSv (stylized OSv) is a cloud computing focused[1] computer operating system released on September 16, 2013. It is a special-purpose operating system built to run as a guest on top of a virtual machine, thus it does not include drivers for bare-metal hardware.
It is a unikernel, designed to run a single Linux executable or an application written in one of the supported runtime environments (such as Java).[2] For this reason, it does not support a notion of users (it's not a multiuser system) or processes - everything runs in a single address space,[3] there is no difference between users address space and kernel address space. Using a single address space removes some of the time-consuming operations associated with context switching.[4]
It uses large amounts of code from the FreeBSD operating system, in particular the network stack and the ZFS file system. OSv can be managed using a REST Management API and an optional command-line interface written in Lua.
References
- ^ Kurth, Lars (3 December 2013). "Are Cloud Operating Systems the Next Big Thing?". linux.com. Archived from the original on 2014-08-01. Retrieved 5 December 2013.
- ^ Madhavapeddy, Anil & Scott, David J. (12 January 2014). "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System". ACM Queue. Retrieved 20 May 2014.
- ^ Buys, Jon (18 September 2013). "Cloudius Systems Announced OSv, an Operating System for the Cloud". OStatic. Archived from the original on 27 November 2013. Retrieved 11 March 2014.
- ^ Corbet, Jonathan (18 September 2013). "Rethinking the guest operating system". LWN.net. Retrieved 28 September 2013.
External links
- osv on GitHub
- Slides introducing the basic concept
- OSv—Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines—paper presented at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in 2014
- Original announcement
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