Towards Highly Specialized, POSIX-compliant Software Stacks with Unikraft: Work-in-Progress

Sharan Santhanam, Simon Kuenzer, Hugo Lefeuvre, Felipe Huici, Alexander Jung, Santiago Pagani, George-Cristian Muraru, Stefano Stabellini, Justin He, Jonathan Beri

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Abstract

Increasingly, embedded devices are being equipped with ARM processors. Because of ease-of-use and widespread support for drivers and applications, Linux is often used as the OS of choice, even though it consumes a significant amount of the device’s limited resources and its large attack surface presents opportunities for exploits. In this paper we propose Unikraft, a fully librarized operating system and build tool which allows for generating specialized OSes and software stacks targeting specific applications, while removing unneeded functionality. As a proof of concept, we port Unikraft to the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and to a Xilinx Ultra96-V2. On these boards, Unikraft is able to boot in 88-158 milliseconds, consume only hundreds of KBs of memory when running real-world application such as NGINX, all the while providing visible reductions in power consumption compared to Linux distributions. Unikraft is an open source project and can be found at unikraft.org.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTowards Highly Specialized, POSIX-compliant Software Stacks with Unikraft: Work-in-Progress
Place of PublicationSingapore, Singapore
PublisherIEEE
Number of pages3
Volume2020 International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT)
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Sept 2020

Keywords

  • embedded systems
  • operating systems

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  • Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way

    Kuenzer, S., Bădoiu, V.-A., Lefeuvre, H., Santhanam, S., Jung, A., Gain, G., Cyril, S., Lupu, C., Teodorescu, Ș., Răducanu, C., Banu, C., Mathy, L., Deaconescu, R., Raiciu, C. & Huici, F., 23 Apr 2021, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Systems. 16 ed. ACM Digital Library

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Open Access

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