Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way · HackerPapers discussions

Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way — mentioned by nderjung

Tue, 14 May 2024 12:31:22 GMT

Containers are perfect for build environments and for creating the root filesystem. The issue is that the kernel these days are super bulky and are intended for multi-user, multi-process environments. Running a container runtime on top just makes it worse when you're looking for "isolation". This paper argues that when you build a extremely minimal kernel (i.e. ditch Linux entirely) and link your application against necessary bits of code to execute _as_ a VM, then you'll get better performance than a container and you'll get that isolation. This is in fact true based on performance studies…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way — mentioned by nderjung

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 15:57:47 GMT

In fact this is not true with Linux. We did a study of this[0] and found that there are too many interdependencies between Linux kernel subsystems. The smallest, usable Linux kernel we test with sometimes is around 30MB. In comparison, compiling NGINX together with Unikraft results in a kernel size of under 2MB. This means that there is 28MB of kernel we didn't need or want. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.12721 (See Figure 1)

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way — HN submission

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 11:31:46 GMT

Unikraft – Fast, Specialized Unikernels

138 points; 72 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.