OSv (stylized OS^v) is a

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

focused computer

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

released on September 16, 2013. It is a special-purpose operating system built to run as a guest on top of a virtual machine, thus it does not include drivers for bare-metal hardware. It is a

unikernel A unikernel is a type of computer program that is static linking, statically linked with the operating system code on which it depends. Unikernels are built with a specialized compiler that identifies the operating system services that a program ...

, designed to run a single

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

executable or an application written in one of the supported runtime environments (such as

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

). For this reason, it does not support a notion of users (it's not a multiuser system) or processes - everything runs in a single

address space In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a memory cell or other logical or physical entity. For software programs to save and retrieve ...

, there is no difference between users address space and kernel address space. Using a single address space removes some of the time-consuming operations associated with

context switching In computing, a context switch is the process of storing the state of a process or thread, so that it can be restored and resume execution at a later point, and then restoring a different, previously saved, state. This allows multiple processes ...

. It uses large amounts of code from the

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

operating system, in particular the network stack and the

ZFS ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with Volume manager, volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris (operating system), Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, includin ...

file system. OSv can be managed using a REST Management API and an optional command-line interface written in

Lua Lua is a lightweight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language designed mainly for embedded use in applications. Lua is cross-platform software, since the interpreter of compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C, and Lua has a relatively ...

References

External links

*
Slides introducing the basic concept

OSv—Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines
��paper presented at the

USENIX Annual Technical Conference The USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC, or, canonically, USENIX) is a conference of computing researchers sponsored by the USENIX association. The conference includes computing tutorials, and a single track technical session for present ...

in 2014
Original announcement
{{Operating-system-stub Computing platforms Free software operating systems Free software programmed in C++ Software companies of Israel Software using the BSD license X86-64 operating systems