Modularization

Introduction

By design, OSv has always been a "fat" unikernel and provided a large subset of glibc functionality, drivers for many devices, and hypervisors

Hiding most symbols and standard C++ library

ZFS support as an external library

ZFS is one of the three filesystems that OSv implements. The original code comes from FreeBSD circa 2014 and has been since integrated and adapted to work within OSv. ZFS is one of the best file systems for persistent mutable data and what ones needs to run mysql or elasticsearch on OSv for example. Although a lot of effort has gone into integrating ZFS into OSv, its sheer code base volume makes OSv kernel bigger than it needs to be and there are a plethora of stateless use cases like redis, memcached, microservices, etc where ZFS is not needed and instead we can use ROFS now. ZFS-less kernel is expected to be at least 1MB smaller, which should make OSv images smaller, use less memory, and boot slightly faster. So it would be nice to make it optional as a shared library.

Driver Profiles

App-specific kernel

Future enhancements