mirage VS unikraft

Compare mirage vs unikraft and see what are their differences.

mirage

MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels (by mirage)

unikraft

A next-generation cloud native kernel designed to unlock best-in-class performance, security primitives and efficiency savings. (by unikraft)
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mirage unikraft
32 26
2,425 2,273
0.9% 18.5%
8.7 9.8
14 days ago 7 days ago
OCaml C
ISC License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

mirage

Posts with mentions or reviews of mirage. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-18.

unikraft

Posts with mentions or reviews of unikraft. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-01.
  • KraftCloud
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
  • Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Nov 2023
  • Building a unikernel that runs WebAssembly – part 1
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Oct 2023
    You should also probably check out Unikraft (https://unikraft.org) , supports many languages/apps, x86/ARM64 and QEMU/Firecracker. Is also able to run an ELF built under Linux as a unikernel (see https://unikraft.org/guides/bincompat). Discord is at https://unikraft.org/discord .
  • Unikraft is a fast, secure and open-source Unikernel Development Kit
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Oct 2023
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2023
  • What Is a Unikernel?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2023
    >"For performance-oriented UDP-based apps, much of the OS networking stack is useless:

    the app could simply use the driver API, much like DPDK-style applications already do.

    There is currently no way to easily remove just the network stack but not the entire network sub-system from standard OSes."

    This page is a great read for any current or future OS developer...

    Related:

    "Unikraft is a fast, secure and open-source Unikernel Development Kit":

    https://unikraft.org/

    "Unikraft is an automated system for building specialized OSes known as unikernels."

    https://github.com/unikraft/unikraft

  • Build Your Own Docker with Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and Chroot
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2023
    unikernel is not the same microkernel.

    I've found these after some quick googling:

    https://unikraft.org/

  • I don't believe in the success of wasm
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 18 Dec 2022
    Check out https://github.com/unikraft/unikraft
  • A future without containers? ( thoughts )
    6 projects | /r/freebsd | 10 Nov 2022
    Wow, just now seeing this topic. I work for a cloud company hosted in AWS. We started out, Netflix/Spotify style microservices. We were all on ec2 images generate by packer (and later with AWS Image Factory). When Docker hit, we kicked the tires but never did anything with it beyond using it for running unit tests, and later, infrastructure tests. 5 years ago, during a hackathon, our little group began experimenting with Unikernels, or library operating systems. Interestingly enough, these Unikernels were all stripped down BSD kernels. OSv is FreeBSD based, and Rumprun is NetBSD based. Services running in EC2 on Unikernels would spin up and start sending and receiving traffic before the AWS EC2 healthchecks completed. They are blazing fast! Only problem in 2017, was the tooling. It would have taken too much effort to use Unikernals with our infrastructure. As soon as they start making Unikernels that can run Java bytecode like native code, the fate of containerization will be sealed, IMO. We could get basic JVM webservers running on OSv, but not Cassandra, not Kafka, not yet. OSv now runs on Firecracker, but I have not tried it out, yet. Some links if you are interested: OSv: https://osv.io Rumprun: https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun We used this tooling during the Hackathon, but doesn't look like it has been touched in 3 years: https://github.com/solo-io/unik Unikraft Unikernel Dev kit: https://unikraft.org/ And don't forget Firecracker running in Kubernetes https://www.weave.works/oss/firekube/ And of course, being a FreeBSD subreddit, let's not forget FreeBSD on Firecracker https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2022-10-18-FreeBSD-Firecracker.html
  • Linux as single app ?
    5 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 21 Aug 2022
    and Unikraft

What are some alternatives?

When comparing mirage and unikraft you can also consider the following projects:

oberon-riscv - Oberon RISC-V port, based on Samuel Falvo's RISC-V compiler and Peter de Wachter's Project Norebo. Part of an academic project to evaluate Project Oberon on RISC-V.

nanos - A kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment

Carp - A statically typed lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications.

unik - The Unikernel & MicroVM Compilation and Deployment Platform

linuxkit - A toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers

Mezzano - An operating system written in Common Lisp

distroless - 🥑 Language focused docker images, minus the operating system.

Lupine-Linux - Linux in Unikernel Clothing

riscv-rust - RISC-V processor emulator written in Rust+WASM

console - a debugger for async rust!

rusty-hermit - Hermit for Rust. [Moved to: https://github.com/hermit-os/hermit-rs]