These days, most applications running on virtual machines in the cloud run on top of Linux. We all love Linux, but as an all-encompassing operating system for everything from phones to supercomputers, Linux was never really designed for virtual machines; It is big and complex, and it offers features (such as multi-user and multi-process) which are  today made redundant by the hypervisor and slow it down. Linux’s APIs are many times set in stone by decades of legacy code.  All these cost in application performance, and make it harder to innovate.

This is why we developed OSv, a new operating system designed to run a single application on a virtual machine. As it runs a single application there is no need for kernel-userspace isolation, reducing context switch costs and unnecessary copying. A design from scratch allowed us to experiment with new ideas like lock-free mutexes (solving the Lock-Holder Preemption problem that plagues operating systems on virtual machines), extremely fast context switches, Van Jacobson’s network channels (see http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/vj/lca06vj.pdf), and more.   Also, OSv is released under the more permissive BSD license (not GPL like Linux), is tiny compared to Linux, and takes less than one second to boot and start the user’s application.

via Announce: OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual machines.

Presentation slides can be seen here.