I've had limited adventures in embedded software and as part of that became a fan of Zephyr (http://www.zephyrproject.org) and wonder about its potential application as a unikernel.
On the minus side: I think porting "traditional" software - say Nginx - to it will be agonising. And I can't make any guarantees about its performance in the same way that Alpine Linux container images are not necessarily fast.
But there's an entire toolchain, debugging story, drivers etc. for something that compiles to tiny and starts up basically instantaneously. Surely that's got to be useful for something?
[−]laidoffamazon · 2026-10-10 Sat 23:55 UTC ·
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> think porting "traditional" software - say Nginx - to it will be agonising
I think this is basically a solved problem with enough agents and enough compute now
On the plus side: it's a unikernel. You compile it and your application together and get a binary. It has support for running on virtual hardware (https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/hardware/virtualizatio...) and virtio is the new bios, right?
On the minus side: I think porting "traditional" software - say Nginx - to it will be agonising. And I can't make any guarantees about its performance in the same way that Alpine Linux container images are not necessarily fast.
But there's an entire toolchain, debugging story, drivers etc. for something that compiles to tiny and starts up basically instantaneously. Surely that's got to be useful for something?
I think this is basically a solved problem with enough agents and enough compute now