Unikernels: the next stage of Linux’s dominance

Unikernels have demonstrated enormous advantages over Linux in many important domains, causing some to propose that the days of Linux's dominance may be coming to an end. On the contrary, we believe that unikernels' advantages represent the next natural evolution for Linux, as it can adopt the best ideas from the unikernel approach and, along with its battle-tested codebase and large open source community, continue to dominate. In this paper, we posit that an upstreamable unikernel target is achievable from the Linux kernel, and, through an early Linux unikernel prototype, demonstrate that some simple changes can bring dramatic performance advantages.Accepted manuscrip

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

UniProcessor Symmetric Multi Processor MultiCore

x86 – 16 x86_64 – 8, 512(LargeSMP) ia64 – 8, 64(SGI

Unikernel Linux (UKL)

This paper presents Unikernel Linux (UKL), a path toward integrating unikernel optimization techniques in Linux, a general purpose operating system. UKL adds a configuration option to Linux allowing for a single, optimized process to link with the kernel directly, and run at supervisor privilege. This UKL process does not require application source code modification, only a re-link with our, slightly modified, Linux kernel and glibc. Unmodified applications show modest performance gains out of the box, and developers can further optimize applications for more significant gains (e.g. 26% throughput improvement for Redis). UKL retains support for co-running multiple user level processes capable of communicating with the UKL process using standard IPC. UKL preserves Linux's battle-tested codebase, community, and ecosystem of tools, applications, and hardware support. UKL runs both on bare-metal and virtual servers and supports multi-core execution. The changes to the Linux kernel are modest (1250 LOC).Comment: Added more results in the evaluation section. Improved overall writing and added diagrams to explain the architectur