Announce: OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual machines

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013, Nadav Har'El wrote about "Announce: OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual machines":
> Hi, today we've made the first release of OSv, a new operating system for
> running applications on virtual machines.
> 
> OSv is free software, released under the BSD license, and you can find it in
> https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv and http://www.osv.io.
> There is also a mailing list: osv-dev at googlegroups.com.

For those interested in meeting some of the OSv developers, shortly
hearing about it and trying it on their own laptop and their own
application, we are holding a meetup on Wednesday May 28th, 5:30pm,
in our office in Herzliyya:

http://www.meetup.com/OSv-Developer-Meetup/events/181683582/

It's a free meeting (of course), but we'll appreciate it if people RSVP
on the meetup.com site so we'll have an estimate on how many are coming.

See you,
Nadav.

> 
> These days, most applications running on virtual machines in the cloud run
> on top of Linux. We all love Linux, but as an all-encompassing operating
> system for everything from phones to supercomputers, Linux was never
> really designed for virtual machines; It is big and complex, and it
> offers features (such as multi-user and multi-process) which are today
> made redundant by the hypervisor and slow it down. Linux's APIs are many
> times set in stone by decades of legacy code.
> All these cost in application performance, and make it harder to innovate.
> 
> This is why we developed OSv, a new operating system designed to run
> a single application on a virtual machine. As it runs a single application
> there is no need for kernel-userspace isolation, reducing context switch
> costs and unnecessary copying. A design from scratch allowed us to
> experiment with new ideas like lock-free mutexes (solving the Lock-Holder
> Preemption problem that plagues operating systems on virtual machines),
> extremely fast context switches, Van Jacobson's network channels (see
> http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/vj/lca06vj.pdf), and more.
> Also, OSv is released under the more permissive BSD license (not GPL
> like Linux), is tiny compared to Linux, and takes less than one second
> to boot and start the user's application.
> 
> OSv can run ordinary Linux shared objects, such as, for example, an
> unmodified JVM (e.g., OpenJDK) executable, and of course on that you can
> run any application written in Java, JRuby , Clojure, or any other JVM
> language. Even at this early stage of OSv's development, OSv can already
> successfully run several interesting workloads such as Netperf, Memcached,
> Cassandra and SpecJVM - and usually match or even beat Linux's performance.
> 
> Another refreshing feature of OSv is that is written in C++.
> It's been 40 years since Unix was (re)written in C, and the time has
> come for something better.
> C++ is not about writing super-complex type hierarchies (as some people
> might have you believe). Rather, it allowed us to write shorter code
> with less boiler-plate repetition and less chances for bugs. It allowed
> us to more easily reuse quality code and data structures. And using
> newly standardized C++11 features, we were able to write safe concurrent
> code with standard language features instead of processor-specific
> hacks. And all of this with zero performance overheads - most of C++'s
> features, most notably templates, are compile-time features which result
> in no run-time overhead compared to C code.
> 
> OSv was developed by Cloudius Systems, a small Israeli startup led by
> Dor Laor and Avi Kivity (of KVM fame) but it is an open-source project -
> developed since its inception on github
> (https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv), and released under the BSD
> license. We would like to take this opportunity to invite everyone to use
> OSv, and to help drive its development forward. OSv is a fantastic
> playground for kernel developers, and also for people involved in cloud
> development, devops, and so on. Tell us what your dream VM operating
> system will do, and maybe your dream will come true :-) Maybe you can even
> help us make that dream come true.
> 
> If you want to try OSv, check out the announcement and usage instructions
> on the OSv mailing list:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/osv-dev/enqdqN2A0as
> 
> 
> -- 
> Nadav Har'El                        |      Monday, Sep 16 2013, 13 Tishri 5774
> nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A computer once beat me at chess, but it
> http://nadav.harel.org.il           |was no match for me at kickboxing.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Monday, May 12 2014, 12 Iyyar 5774
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Politics, n: from Greek, "poly"=many,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |"ticks"=blood sucking parasites.