A lot like: http://www.openmirage.org/

This is an operating system that runs directly on the Xen hypervisor, written in OCaml, which does away with the usual OS abstractions.

So in the end, we're reinventing the OS with a hypervisor acting as the kernel? Are the current hypervisors better or worse than the Linux kernel at this task? What's the reason people don't just run these processes straight in a regular Linux install with properly configured users/chroots/quotas?

This seems a bit ridiculous to me.

In the beginning you had

[OS] -> App

Then, people would put those Apps into a VM, the trend going to one VM per app.

[OS] -> [VM] -> [App]

Just to realize that the VM may be too much of an overhead, so now OSv comes along to cut that down, relying on the OS for memory management, task scheduling, etc, effectively ending up with

[OS] -> [translation layer] -> App

So that's just a glorified sandbox, why not just use LXC?

Like others here, I am unconvinced that there is any benefit to basically using virtual machines as heavyweight processes. The existence of at least one multi-tenant IaaS provider (Joyent) and a few multi-tenant PaaS providers (Heroku, dotCloud) using OS-level virtualization suggests that a shared kernel running multiple processes provides enough isolation.

This sounds like a great opportunity for anyone wanting to get into os development with a few easy tasks still todo.

I'm curious how you would configure and manage your applications. Like are you able to attach to the input and output streams from the host or would you still get some basic form of bash to manage it?

Wow.

I've played with CoreOS a bit, but this is a much more radical change.

I love how people are beginning to rethink many of the things that all successful operating systems have had in common so far.

The idea of using virtualization as an inherent layer in the application architecture (ht IBM OS/360) is great for flexibility.

So we have a guest operating system that doesn't implement multitasking/timesharing because you can safely leave that up to the hypervisor. Is it just me, or is this more or less the same thing that was done with VM/CMS on IBM 370s in 1972?

1000 words on why this matters: http://www.slideshare.net/eonnen/high-performance-network-pr...

Very similar to: https://github.com/anttikantee/rumpuser-xen

Will this make it possible to use docker.io directly under OSX without having to use vagrant / virtualbox to run a linux host OS for LXC containers?

Right now, only Xen, KVM and EC2 HVM are supported hypervisors. Hopefully an OSX might come with vmware support later.