OSv

This article is about the operating system. For other uses of "OSV", seeOSV (disambiguation).

OSv

Developer	Cloudius Systems
Written in	C++
Working state	Stable
Source model	Open source
Initial release	September 16, 2013(2013-09-16)
Marketing target	Cloud computing
Available in	Multilingual
Platforms	x86-64 using theKVM,Xen,VMware,andVirtualBoxhypervisors. (arm64 onKVMis under development)
Kerneltype	Unikernel
Userland	POSIX, Java, Ruby
Default user interface	CLI, web
License	BSD license
Official website	osv.io

OSv(stylized OS^v) is acloud computingfocusedcomputeroperating systemreleased 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 aunikernel,designed to run a singleLinuxexecutable or an application written in one of the supported runtime environments (such asJava).For this reason, it does not support a notion of users (it's not a multiuser system) or processes - everything runs in a singleaddress space,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 withcontext switching.It uses large amounts of code from theFreeBSDoperating system, in particular the network stack and theZFSfile system. OSv can be managed using a REST Management API and an optional command-line interface written inLua.

External links

• osvonGitHub
• Slides introducing the basic concept
• OSv—Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines—paper presented at theUSENIX Annual Technical Conferencein 2014
• Original announcement