Qumranet was founded by Moshe Bar, a master of XEN virtualization hypervisor, and Rami Tamir, former Director of Engineering at Cisco. Two years after being acquired by RedHat, members of Qumranet founded Cloudius Systems.
Recently, the Israeli startup Cloudius Systems, led by Dor Laor and Avi Kivity, released the virtualized operating system OSv under a BSD free software license.
The motivation behind OSv is that most applications today run on GNU/Linux virtual machines in the cloud, but GNU/Linux was not designed for virtualization from the start. Features like multi-user and multi-process modes not only introduce complexity but also become performance bottlenecks for today’s hypervisors. The design goal of OSv is to run a single application on a single virtual machine, eliminating the need for kernel-land to user-land isolation entirely, thereby reducing the overhead of context switching. It also provides an opportunity to experiment with new ideas like lock-free mutexes and Van Jacobson’s network channels. In terms of boot speed, OSv can complete startup in just 2 seconds. Regarding security, it currently supports detection of use-after-free (still confirming with the author whether this is a runtime check). The networking stack fully inherits FreeBSD’s TCP/IP protocol stack, and the file system supports ZFS. The OSv community hopes more hackers will join in.
From: http://www.solidot.org/story?sid=36649