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arXiv:2206.00789cs.OS

Unikernel Linux (UKL)

Ali Raza, Thomas Unger, Matthew Boyd, Eric Munson, Parul Sohal, Ulrich Drepper, Richard Jones, Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Larry Woodman, Renato Mancuso, Jonathan Appavoo, Orran Krieger

Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.

Abstract

This paper presents Unikernel Linux (UKL), a path toward integrating unikernel optimization techniques in Linux, a general purpose operating system. UKL adds a configuration option to Linux allowing for a single, optimized process to link with the kernel directly, and run at supervisor privilege. This UKL process does not require application source code modification, only a re-link with our, slightly modified, Linux kernel and glibc. Unmodified applications show modest performance gains out of the box, and developers can further optimize applications for more significant gains (e.g. 26% throughput improvement for Redis). UKL retains support for co-running multiple user level processes capable of communicating with the UKL process using standard IPC. UKL preserves Linux's battle-tested codebase, community, and ecosystem of tools, applications, and hardware support. UKL runs both on bare-metal and virtual servers and supports multi-core execution. The changes to the Linux kernel are modest (1250 LOC).

arXiv comments
Added more results in the evaluation section. Improved overall writing and added diagrams to explain the architecture
Journal reference
Proceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 23), May 2023, Pages 590 - 605
DOI
doi:10.1145/3552326.3587458
Subjects
cs.OSOperating Systems

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Linked by 1 identifiable commenter in 1 comment across 1 thread, from Dec 2022 to Dec 2022. Found in 1 HN submission from Jun 2022 to Jun 2022. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments1 thread

    • For something completely different, you might want to look at Unikernel Linux: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00789 You could run all the code without switching between userspace and the kernel, and you can call into kernel functions directly (with the usual caveats about kernel ABI…

      rwmjView on HNParent context

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