TY - GEN
T1 - A Linux in unikernel clothing
AU - Kuo, Hsuan Chi
AU - Williams, Dan
AU - Koller, Ricardo
AU - Mohan, Sibin
N1 - We thank the anonymous reviewers of EuroSys and our shepherd, Thomas Pasquier, for the valuable feedback that improved this paper. This work is supported in part by IBM-ILLINOIS Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) - a research collaboration as part of the IBM AI Horizons Network. This work is also supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) grant N00014-17-S-B010.
PY - 2020/4/17
Y1 - 2020/4/17
N2 - Unikernels leverage library OS architectures to run isolated workloads on the cloud. They have garnered attention in part due to their promised performance characteristics such as small image size, fast boot time, low memory footprint and application performance. However, those that aimed at generality fall short of the application compatibility, robustness and, more importantly, community that is available for Linux. In this paper, we describe and evaluate Lupine Linux, a standard Linux system that-Through kernel configuration specialization and system call overhead elimination-Achieves unikernel-like performance, in fact outperforming at least one reference unikernel in all of the above dimensions. At the same time, Lupine can run any application (since it is Linux) when faced with more general workloads, whereas many unikernels simply crash. We demonstrate a graceful degradation of unikernel-like performance properties.
AB - Unikernels leverage library OS architectures to run isolated workloads on the cloud. They have garnered attention in part due to their promised performance characteristics such as small image size, fast boot time, low memory footprint and application performance. However, those that aimed at generality fall short of the application compatibility, robustness and, more importantly, community that is available for Linux. In this paper, we describe and evaluate Lupine Linux, a standard Linux system that-Through kernel configuration specialization and system call overhead elimination-Achieves unikernel-like performance, in fact outperforming at least one reference unikernel in all of the above dimensions. At the same time, Lupine can run any application (since it is Linux) when faced with more general workloads, whereas many unikernels simply crash. We demonstrate a graceful degradation of unikernel-like performance properties.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85087108292
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85087108292#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3342195.3387526
DO - 10.1145/3342195.3387526
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85087108292
T3 - Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2020
BT - Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2020
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 15th European Conference on Computer Systems, EuroSys 2020
Y2 - 27 April 2020 through 30 April 2020
ER -