Maintainer of Oxen here, we initially built Oxen because DVC was pretty painfully slow to work with, and had a lot of extra bells and whistles that we didn’t need. Under the hood we optimized the merkle tree structure, hashing algorithms, network protocols, etc to make it speedy when it came to large datasets. We have a pretty nice front end at https://oxen.ai for viewing and querying the data as well.
never heard of oxen but it looks like a super interesting alternative. would love to hear from someone who has experience with both.
my first impression: dvc is made to use with git where there are arbitrary folders handled by dvc INSIDE your git repo, where oxen is an alternative for a separate data repo. also oxen has lots of integration with dataframes and tabular, ai training and infernece data that dvc is missing. on the other hand dvc has a full DAG pipeline engine integrated as well as import/ export and pluggable backends.
Dolthub is more about versioning structured SQL data tables. Oxen handles more large unstructured sets of images, video, audio, text, and DataFrame (parquet, csv, arrow, etc) files
It is explained well on the Wikipedia page of MINIX 3[1]:
> To achieve that, the code running in kernel must be minimal, with the file server, process server, and each device driver running as separate user-mode processes. Each driver is carefully monitored by a part of the system named the reincarnation server[2]. If a driver fails to respond to pings from this server, it is shut down and replaced by a fresh copy of the driver. In a monolithic system, a bug in a driver can easily crash the whole kernel. This is far less likely to occur in MINIX 3.
Some microkernel based systems have more monolithic designs where there's one big "most of the os" server that might be derived from a BSD or Linux kernel and the microkernel's role is more like a hypervisor.
>>It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels
