Docker was conceived to solve the problem of things "working on my machine", and not anywhere else. This was generally caused by the differences in the configuration and versions of dependencies. Its approach was simple: bundle both of these together with the application in unified images, and deploy these images as atomic units.

Somewhere along the lines however, the problem has mutated into "works on my container host". How is that possible? Turns out that with larger modular applications, the configuration and dependencies naturally demand separation. This results in them moving up a layer, in this case creating a network of inter-dependent containers that you now have to put together for the whole thing to start... and we're back to square one, with way more bloat in between.

Now hardware virtualization. I like how AArch64 generalizes this: there are 4 levels of privilege baked into the architecture. Each has control over the lower and can call up the one immediately above to request a service. Simple. Let's narrow our focus to the lowest three: EL0 (classically the user space), EL1 (the kernel), EL2 (the hypervisor). EL0, in most operating systems, isn't capable of doing much on its own; its sole purpose is to do raw computation and request I/O from EL1. EL1, on the other hand, has the powers to directly talk to the hardware.

Everyone is happy, until the complexity of EL1 grows out of control and becomes a huge attack surface, difficult to secure and easy to exploit from EL0. Not good. The naive solution? Go a level above, and create a layer that will constrain EL1, or actually, run multiple, per-application EL1s, and punch some holes through for them to still be able to do the job—create a hypervisor. But then, as those vaguely defined "holes", also called system calls and hyper calls, grow, won't so the attack surface?

Or in other words, with the user space shifting to EL1, will our hypervisor become the operating system, just like docker-compose became a dynamic linker?

[0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-f...

Also always a little wary of projects that have bad typos or grammar problems in a README - in particular on one of the headings (thought it's possible these are on purpose?). But that's just me :\

Neat.

file sharing is complex too it seems

would be good to see a benchmark or something showing where it shines

What use cases would Toro fit? pros and cons ?