A Syscall-Level Binary-Compatible Unikernel

IEEE Transactions on Computers, pp. 1

Abstract

Unikernels are minimal single-purpose virtual machines. They are highly popular in the research domain due to the benefits they provide. A barrier to their widespread adoption is the difficulty/impossibility to port existing applications to current unikernels. HermiTux is the first unikernel providing system call-level binary compatibility with Linux applications. It is composed of a hypervisor and a lightweight kernel layer emulating the load- and runtime Linux ABI. HermiTux relieves application developers from the burden of porting software, while providing unikernel benefits such as security through hardware-assisted virtualized isolation, swift boot time, and low disk/memory footprint. Fast system calls and kernel modularity are enabled through binary rewriting and analysis techniques, as well as shared library substitution. HermiTuxs design principles are architecture-independent and we present a prototype on both the x86-64 and ARM aarch64 ISAs, targeting various cloud as well as edge/embedded deployments. We demonstrate HermiTuxs compatibility over a range of native C/C++/Fortran/Python Linux applications. We also show that it offers a similar degree of lightweightness compared to other unikernels, and that it performs similarly to Linux in many cases: its performance overhead averages 3% in memory- and compute-bound scenarios, and its I/O performance is acceptable.

Authors 6

1. Pierre Olivier

   University of Manchester

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 5292 Manchester, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, (e-mail: pierre.olivier@manchester.ac.uk)

   Advanced Processor Technology

2. Hugo Lefeuvre

   University of Manchester

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, 5292 Manchester, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, (e-mail: hugo.lefeuvre@manchester.ac.uk)

3. Daniel Chiba
   Affiliation as printed

   N/A, QUALCOMM Inc, 40753 Boston, Massachusetts, United States, (e-mail: danchiba@vt.edu)

4. Stefan Lankes Aachen Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems, RWTH Aachen University, 9165 Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, (e-mail: slankes@eonerc.rwth-aachen.de)

5. Changwoo Min

   Virginia Tech

   Affiliation as printed

   Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States, (e-mail: changwoo@vt.edu)

6. Binoy Ravindran

   Virginia Tech

   Affiliation as printed

   The Bradley Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, United States, 24061 (e-mail: binoy@vt.edu)