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It would have helped to state their mission goals. This is basically a page that says "look we made this, no underlying stack and lots of CSP", without stating what they hope to achieve or improve versus the status quo.

Are there security benefits? Probably. Better performance? Could be. But why did they come up with their solution? What about differences with other Unikernel approaches? I mean its a research lab, not a hobby project.




This submission is here because of the link to the intro to OSes book[1] by one of the Clive authors that was posted yesterday. It's worth taking a look at the other stuff referenced on this page page, as well as the author's other links.[2]

To answer your question:

> Better performance? Could be.

That's one aspect. If you follow the link from the Clive page to its predecessor Nix[3], its tagline is "high performance cloud computing is nix". A current (2018) justification for that project can be found in the form of an abstract for a paper with the same name[4].

But then the other part is given away in the abstract for Clive itself: "Clive introduces new file system technology and novel interfaces for the construction of networked system"[5], which is another way of saying that this is blue sky research, which is itself a codeword for we decided to try out a bunch of things purely _because_ they're different and want to see if anything will come out of it. Notice how the screenshot here shows the OS shell is some sort of acme-like[6] made to run in a web browser, for example.

To repeat my earlier remark, the author's other pages are well worth a look. For example, don't miss this[7] page chock full of links to research OSes (although many of them are dead). Or there's Picky[8], which looks like what you'd get if you took Pascal/Oberon and more or less did a transliteration so that the grammar gives you a curly brace language instead of a wordy, shouty one with BEGIN, END, etc.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16253193

2. http://lsub.org/ls/nix.html

3. http://lsub.org/ls/nix.html

4. http://lsub.org/ls/nixbltjabs.pdf

5. http://lsub.org/export/clivesys.pdf

6. http://syssoftware.blogspot.com/2016/02/clives-ink-screensho...

7. https://lsub.org/who/nemo/os.html

8. http://lsub.org/ls/picky.html


There is a new paper[1] from F.J. Balleteros published on 2017 that serves as a great justification too.

- [1] https://jisajournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13174...




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