We are going to present the Xen Project/Linux Foundation's open source Unikraft project. Its high level goal is to provide an automated tool to build unikernels without requiring the time-consuming, expert work as today. In addition, Unikraft targets support for multiple "platforms": Xen, KVM, containers and bare-metal. Images are automatically produced for multiple of these platforms without requiring any additional time from users.

Highly specialized Unikernels are still terrible to develop and maintain. Applications have to be ported manually to non-standard OSes before gaining from impressive benefits, like superb performance, great isolation, and a small trusted compute base. Unikernels can be instantiated in tens of milliseconds or less. They are tiny with low memory footprints of a few MBs or even KBs. They can achieve high network throughput of 10-40 Gb/s with a single CPU core and they enable running thousands of concurrent instances.

We have spent quite a bit of our time over the last years developing unikernels – highly specialized virtual machine images targeting specific applications. We have been particularly interested in them since because of their fantastic performance benefits: tiny memory footprints (hundreds of KBs or a few MBs), boot times comparable to those of processes, and small migration times, to name a few metrics.

Despite the fact that this work and work from several others is proof of their potential, unikernels have yet to see massive adoption. One of the main showstoppers is development time: for instance, developing Minipython [4], a MicroPython unikernel, took the better part of 3 months to put together and test. ClickOS [5], a unikernel for NFV, was the result of a couple of years of work. What’s particularly bad about this development model besides the considerable time spent is that each unikernel was basically a “throwaway”: every time we wanted to create a new unikernel targeting a different application, we would start more or less from scratch. This comes from the fact that each application has different OS dependencies and benefit from different optimizations and specializations of these layers.

One year ago, we started Unikraft as an open source incubator project under the umbrella of the Xen Project and the Linux Foundation. Our goal is to build a common pool of decomposed OS functionalities, called libraries, where various Unikernel projects can share implementations and optimizations with others. We started with initial and elementary pieces like schedulers, memory allocators, an VFS layer, network stacks and the pool is growing. The project provides Unikernel builders a menu where these libraries can be picked and configured. Unikraft's build system quickly and automatically creates images tailored to the needs of their specific applications. The users can choose multiple target platforms (e.g., Xen, KVM, containers, bare metal) without having to do additional work for each of them.

In this talk we introduce the concept of specialized Unikernels, give an overview of the Unikraft open source project, and show a live demo to the audience.