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Add to SafariWhen comparing Rumprun vs Mirage OS, the Slant community recommends Rumprun for most people. In the question“What are the best unikernels?” Rumprun is ranked 1st while Mirage OS is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Rumprun is:
Rumprun is multiplatform and can run on different types of platforms, including hypervisors (such as Xen and KVM) as well as running on bare hardware.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Can run on bare hardware as well as hypervisors
Rumprun is multiplatform and can run on different types of platforms, including hypervisors (such as Xen and KVM) as well as running on bare hardware.
Pro Can be integrated to existing systems
Rump provides kernel-quality drivers for a variety of use-cases from filesystem to PCI device drivers. Because of this, they can be integrated into existing systems or can be run as standalone unikernels on hypervisors.
Pro Large collection of libraries available
There are more than 100 libraries compatible with MirageOS available and more are being developed everyday.
Pro Built with security in mind
What MirageOS does in simple terms is to provide only the minimal needed for an app to run. It provides only the required network and hardware drivers needed to execute.
Using this approach it minimizes the attack surface for potential hackers since they don't have any shell to log into or any other insecure cruft that other deployment methods, such as full operating systems have.
Pro OCaml
Cons
Con Has some complexity added because it's not based on a language with process isolation
Since C and C++ (with which Rumprun is built) have no language level isolation, Rumprun doesn't have process isolation either. Because of this, sensitive components have to be split into different nodes, isolated by either different virtual machines or different computers.
Con May be too much for regular development work
Letting developers work closer to the metal also makes them lose a lot of the useful abstractions a normal OS has which are not built for no reason. Considering this, it may not be a good idea to always use MirageOS for deploying an application.
