Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way

Kuenzer, Simon; Vlad-Andrei, Bădoiu; Lefeuvre, Hugo; Santhanam, Sharan; Jung, Alexander; Gain, Gaulthier; Soldani, Cyril; Lupu, Costin; Teodorescu, Ştefan; Răducanu, Costi; Banu, Cristian; Mathy, Laurent; Deaconescu, Răzvan; Raiciu, Costin; Huici, Felipe

doi:10.1145/3447786.3456248

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Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way

Kuenzer, Simon; Vlad-Andrei, Bădoiu; Lefeuvre, Hugo et al.

2021 • In Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

Peer reviewed

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https://hdl.handle.net/2268/259437

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10.1145/3447786.3456248

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Keywords :

Operating Systems; Unikernels; Unikraft; Virtualisation; Cloud Computing

Abstract :

[en] Unikernels are famous for providing excellent performance in terms of boot times, throughput and memory consumption, to name a few metrics. However, they are infamous for making it hard and extremely time consuming to extract such performance, and for needing significant engineering effort in order to port applications to them. We introduce Unikraft, a novel micro-library OS that (1) fully modularizes OS primitives so that it is easy to customize the unikernel and include only relevant components and (2) exposes a set of composable, performance-oriented APIs in order to make it easy for developers to obtain high performance.Our evaluation using off-the-shelf applications such as nginx, SQLite, and Redis shows that running them on Unikraft results in a 1.7x-2.7x performance improvement compared to Linux guests. In addition, Unikraft images for these apps are around 1MB, require less than 10MB of RAM to run, and boot in around 1ms on top of the VMM time (total boot time 3ms-40ms). Unikraft is a Linux Foundation open source project and can be found at www.unikraft.org.

Disciplines :

Computer science

Author, co-author :

Kuenzer, Simon ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Montefiore Institute

Vlad-Andrei, Bădoiu

Lefeuvre, Hugo

Santhanam, Sharan

Jung, Alexander

Gain, Gaulthier ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Dép. d'électric., électron. et informat. (Inst.Montefiore) > Systèmes informatiques répartis et sécurité

Soldani, Cyril ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Dép. d'électric., électron. et informat. (Inst.Montefiore) > Systèmes informatiques répartis et sécurité

Lupu, Costin

Teodorescu, Ştefan

Răducanu, Costi

More authors (5 more)

Language :

English

Title :

Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way

Publication date :

26 April 2021

Event name :

EuroSys '21

Event organizer :

ACM

Event place :

Online Event, United Kingdom

Event date :

26-04-2021

Audience :

International

Main work title :

Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

Publisher :

ACM, Online Event, United Kingdom

Pages :

376–394

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

Additional URL :

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12721

European Projects :

H2020 - 825377 - UNICORE - A Common Code Base and Toolkit for Deployment of Applications to Secure and Reliable Virtual Execution Environments

Funders :

EC - European Commission

Available on ORBi :

since 30 April 2021

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