This work was already done in other "Unix" environments like Solaris and BSD (zones and jails)
My personal favorite is SmartOS (based on illumos) it runs zones on bare metal and even has support for running Linux containers (docker)! It does this by wrapping the Linux syscall APIs and translating them. Magic stuff!
Launch a Linux native container and run 'ps' and you will only see processes that you own!
A FreeBSD jail does not emulate or create a virtual machine - it's just a fancy chroot mechanism that produces only the unix processes that actually get run inside the jail.
A jailed httpd does not take up any more resources than the exact same httpd run on the base system.
This makes it extremely efficient and, in fact, allows you to create an even richer multi-user platform than the original one the op has nostalgia for: a multi user unix system where everyone gets to be root.
My personal favorite is SmartOS (based on illumos) it runs zones on bare metal and even has support for running Linux containers (docker)! It does this by wrapping the Linux syscall APIs and translating them. Magic stuff!
Launch a Linux native container and run 'ps' and you will only see processes that you own!
reference: https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Home