Sure, that’s effectively an embedded system, which puts it in the same category as a microcontroller. Like I said, my reply was about normal desktop machines, and not microcontrollers or embedded systems.
I have to admit it’s interesting in the context of virtualization, where deploying a program to a unikernel virtual machine might be perfectly fine for a lot of programs. In that case, some host OS is still handling security and resource contention, so this seems a little like ducking the question.
The unikernel design in practice does not put the kernel into the programming language either, it just allows compiling the kernel and the language together. It still has an OS/user boundary. Security is either non-existent or very difficult with unikernels. Running multiple programs at once is tricky.
“unikernels are unsuitable for the kind of general purpose, multi-user computing that traditional operating systems are used for. Adding additional functionality or altering a compiled unikernel is generally not possible and instead the approach is to compile and deploy a new unikernel with the desired changes.”
I have to admit it’s interesting in the context of virtualization, where deploying a program to a unikernel virtual machine might be perfectly fine for a lot of programs. In that case, some host OS is still handling security and resource contention, so this seems a little like ducking the question.
The unikernel design in practice does not put the kernel into the programming language either, it just allows compiling the kernel and the language together. It still has an OS/user boundary. Security is either non-existent or very difficult with unikernels. Running multiple programs at once is tricky.
“unikernels are unsuitable for the kind of general purpose, multi-user computing that traditional operating systems are used for. Adding additional functionality or altering a compiled unikernel is generally not possible and instead the approach is to compile and deploy a new unikernel with the desired changes.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unikernel