New Operating System Seeks To Replace Linux In the Cloud

[wraggster]

At CloudOpen (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/cloudopen-north-america/program/schedule) in New Orleans, KVM veterans Avi Kivity and Dor Laor revealed their latest venture (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11mxUl8PBDQ3C4QyeHBT8BcMPGzqk-C8bV1Fw8xLgwSI/edit#slide=id.g104154dae_12), a new open-source (BSD license) operating system named OSv. OSv can run existing Linux programs and runtime environments such as a JVM (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/osv-dev/enqdqN2A0as), but unlike Linux, OSv was designed from the ground up to run efficiently on virtual machines. For example, OSv avoids the traditional (but slow) userspace-kernel isolation, as on the cloud VMs normally run a single application. OSv is also much smaller than Linux, and breaks away from tradition by being written in C++11 (the language choice is explained in in this post (http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/2013-September/010649.html)).

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/09/17/2113211/new-operating-system-seeks-to-replace-linux-in-the-cloud