OSv

This article is about the operating system. For other uses of "OSV", see OSV (disambiguation).

OSv (stylized OSv) is a cloud computing focused[1] computer operating system released on September 16, 2013. It is a special-purpose operating system built to run as a guest on top of a virtual machine, thus it does not include drivers for bare-metal hardware. It is a slim, bare bones unikernel including just the functionality necessary to run Java or POSIX applications.[2] For this reason, it does not support a notion of users (it's not a multiuser system) or processes - everything runs in the kernel address space.[3] Using a single address space removes some of the time-consuming operations associated with context switching.[4] It uses large amounts of code from the FreeBSD operating system, in particular the network stack and the ZFS file system. OSv can be managed using a REST Management API and an optional command line interface written in Lua.

References

  1. ^ Kurth, Lars (3 December 2013). "Are Cloud Operating Systems the Next Big Thing?". linux.com. Retrieved 5 December 2013. 
  2. ^ Madhavapeddy, Anil & David J. Scott (12 January 2014). "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System". ACM Queue. Retrieved 20 May 2014. 
  3. ^ [dead link]Buys, Jon (18 September 2013). "Cloudius Systems Announced OSv, an Operating System for the Cloud". OStatic. Retrieved 11 March 2014. 
  4. ^ Corbet, Jonathan (18 September 2013). "Rethinking the guest operating system". LWN.net. Retrieved 28 September 2013. 

External links