The Linux kernel of many popular operating system distributions contains 200-500 million lines of code. The average user never touches many of the libraries that are contained in these operating system distributions. For example, if you spin up a virtual machine on a cloud service provider, the virtual machine will have a USB driver. This is wasted space, because you can’t even interact with the USB port on a virtual machine.

Unikernels are a way to rethink our usage of operating systems. A unikernel uses a stripped down operating system called a library operating system–it contains only the libraries you need for the applications you are running. Today’s guest Scott Weiss joins the show to talk about unikernels, and a project he is working on called UniK, a tool for compiling application sources into unikernels.

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