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Conceptually this is similar to the Stripped Solaris approach I refined from Tony Bates back in 2008. Since 2013 Gogole others have taken this idea further (CoreOS, Ubuntu Snappy, Redhat Atomic) with the concept of core operating systems with the key benefits (again some borrowed from Solaris),
- Operating system upgrade supports transactional upgrade/rollback | Solari had this from way back.
- Traditional package managers replaced by new simplified systems (Snappy), or custom image builds (Atomic) | Yeah we did the same.
- Security enhanced through isolation.
- systemd for system/service management
Results
Here are the differences between a minimal virtual machine, minimal and normal using Ubuntu 10.04.4,
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