ukl

A unikernel based on Linux

Publication

Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux’s Dominance

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{raza2019unikernels,
  title={Unikernels: The Next Stage of Linux's Dominance},
  author={Raza, Ali and Sohal, Parul and Cadden, James and Appavoo, Jonathan and Drepper, Ulrich and Jones, Richard and Krieger, Orran and Mancuso, Renato and Woodman, Larry},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems},
  pages={7--13},
  year={2019},
  organization={ACM}
}

An example of Linux unikernel: TCP echo server

Assuming you are running Fedora, you need the following packages. Run the following command to install them.

    sudo dnf install bc elfutils-devel git hostname kernel-devel openssl-devel qemu supermin
    sudo dnf groupinstall "C Development Tools and Libraries"

UKL requires other Git repos as well. Follow the directions below to download and build them.

1. This Makefile assumes that you have a main directory in which you have three further sub directories. Follow the commands below to get the correct directory layout. (This will not be necessary as we update the Makefile)
   mkdir unikernel cd unikernel git clone https://github.com/razaaliraza/linux.git git clone https://github.com/razaaliraza/ukl.git git clone https://github.com/razaaliraza/min-initrd.git
2. Build Linux
   Note: This will fail at the very end (linking step). Thats ok. cd linux make olddefconfig make -j `nproc`

3. Build the application

   1. For single threaded TCP echo server, run cd ../ukl make singlethreaded-tcp-server
   2. For multi threaded TCP echo server, run cd ../ukl make multithreaded-tcp-server
   3. To just see multiple threads printing, run cd ../ukl make multithreaded-printing This step will build application code and link everything together in a single bzImage

4. Run UKL. This step might take a while because supermin has to create an initrd.

   make run
   

   If this step fails because you dont have KVM enabled on your machine, go to min-initrd directory and open Makefile. Delete enable-kvm flag from run command.

If you get messages about module version mismatch when the kernel boots up, you might want to look at this Supermin page.

1. To test
   1. From a separate terminal, run telnet telnet 127.0.0.1 5555
   2. To test different threads of the multithreaded TCP server, you can build and run the client make client ./client 127.0.0.1

Feedback and Suggestions

This is a work under development. If something does not work or breaks, either open an issue, or if you have an easy fix, create a pull request. Or please let me know and I will try to fix it.

If you have any comments suggestions, email me! aliraza@bu.edu