I do believe they mean a Kernel as you’ve mentioned here, something along the lines of Mach or Linux. For the record, this would be HUGE in my opinion. I would also be curious to know what type of Kernel, what the OS will look like technically, and the time frame around its release and further deployment.
A quick & dirty reference on the topic of Kernel’s for those that need a refresher.
This is a long term optimization we are thinking. We were thinking of unikernel as a way to put all the user space program in the kernel space to avoid large amount of data exchange and context switch when the node software running consensus algorithm.