Overview

Unikraft ASPLOS'22 Tutorial

To be held on Tuesday, March 1st 2022 along with International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'22).

With the advance of virtualization technology and the constant demand for specialization, security and performance, unikernels are no longer a fringe idea. In this tutorial we present Unikraft, a unikernel SDK aiming for extreme specialization.

Unikraft consists of core software components (i.e. internal libraries) and outside optional components (i.e. external libraries), most of which are existing software components (standard C libraries, runtime libraries, frameworks, applications) integrated with the core parts. By allowing extreme configurability and using common APIs backed by multiple implementations, Unikraft makes it easy to tailor custom software solutions for your use case: be it performance, reduced resource utilization, security and safety or functionality, Unikraft makes it happen.

Unikraft is an open source project with a growing and vibrant community available on GitHub and Discord. The community consists of highly skilled industry contributors, academics and students, motivated in creating next-generation software products, pursuing novel research objectives and developing open and challenging technology in operating systems. Recent works realized on the basis of Unikraft include CubicleOS (ASPLOS'21) and FlexOS (to be separately presented at ASPLOS'22).

In this tutorial, we aim to get attendees accustomed to Unikraft and unikernel technology. We present Unikraft internals, highlight research prospects and showcase performance and specialization use cases. We start with an introduction in unikernels and Unikraft, details the build and configuration process of Unikraft, the porting / integration of libraries and applications (both in source code and in binary form) and performance-oriented scenarios.

The tutorial will be highly practical. We will provide remote access to pre-configured machines where attendees will build, configure, run and measure Unikraft-based software components. Attendees are required to have a laptop and an SSH client to access the remote system. Attendees are expected to have good Linux/CLI/shell scripting skills, experience with C programming and build automation and general knowledge of virtualization technology.

Each section in the tutorial will consist of a short presentation / demo (10-15 minutes) followed by practical work to be done by each attendee on their allocated remote machine.

Schedule

The tutorial will take place in Room 2A from 10:00 to 18:00 (CET).