Unikraft - Unleashing the Power of Unikernels

Recently, several papers and projects dedicated to specialized OSes and unikernels have shown the immense potential for performance gains that these have. By leveraging specialization and the use of minimalistic OSes, unikernels are able to yield impressive numbers, including fast instantiation times (tens of milliseconds or less), tiny memory footprints (a few MBs or even KBs), and high consolidation (e.g., being able to run many instances on a single device); a reduced attack surface and easier certification add to their potential.

Their fundamental drawback is that they require that applications be manually ported to the underlying minimalistic OS; this means both expert work and often considerable amount of time. In essence, we need to pick between either efficiency with unikernels, or no porting effort but decreased performance and decreased efficiency with standard OS/VM images.

In this talk we will introduce Unikraft, an open source, incubator project under the auspices of the Xen Project and the Linux Foundation aimed at automating the process of building customized images tailored to specific applications and thus significantly reducing development time. Unikraft decomposes operating systems into elementary pieces called libraries (e.g., schedulers, memory allocators, drivers, filesystems, network stacks, etc.) that users can then pick and choose from, using a menu, to quickly build images tailored to the needs of specific applications. During the talk we will describe Unikraft in greater detail, as well as give a brief demo of how to (very quickly) use it in order to build a few different unikernels.