Two years ago, the Xen Project introduced Unikraft (http://unikraft.org) as an incubation project. Over the past two years, the Unikraft project has seen some great momentum. Since the last release, the community has grown about 20% and contributions have diversified a great deal. Contributions from outside the project founders (NEC) now make up 63% of all contributions, up from about 25% this time last year! In addition, a total of 56,739 lines were added since the last release (0.3).
As a quick primer, Unikraft provides an easier way to build unikernels, compiling source code into a lean operating system that includes functionality specifically tailored to the needs of the application logic. Unikernels, being ultra-lightweight and small, are ideal for not just cloud applications (Unikraft supports deployment on AWS, GCP and Digital Ocean) but also for fields where resources may be constrained or safety is critical. In fact, Unikraft is not only able to produce extremely efficient virtual machines, but in ongoing work also specialized OCI/Docker containers and even bare metal ARM64 images ideally suited for IoT and embedded devices. On a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, for example, Unikraft is able to boot in under 10 milliseconds.
Over the past two years, the Unikraft team has made great progress in simplifying the process of building unikernels through a unified and customizable code base. Unikraft has seen a major increase in features and functionality since the last release. Some of the notable additions for this release (0.4 Rhea) are:
- Cloud-based deployments (GCP, AWS, Digital Ocean)
- Native support for many programming languages and language environments: C++, Python/Micropython, Go, Lua, Web Assembly (WAMR), JavaScript (Duktape), Ruby
- Improvements to the ARM64 platform, including virtio and multi-thread support
- Basic musl support
- pthread and TLS support
- Trace point sub-system
- Filesystem support (9pfs, devfs, ramfs)
- Applications: Click, SQLite, nginx, redis
- Support for external platforms, and in particular solo5
- Additional lib ports: uuid, http-parser, intel-intrinsics, openssl, boost, protobuf, etc.
- Lots of other features and bug fixes
In addition, with this release we’re introducing the kraft tool which greatly simplifies the process of building and running Unikraft-built unikernels; check it out at https://github.com/unikraft/kraft (a special thank you goes to Alex Jung and Mujahid Ali for creating this tool).
As with every release, we are extremely grateful to those who contributed and continue to contribute to this project; below are the contributors (based on Signed-off-by tags):
Costin Lupu 270 (22.0%) Vlad-Andrei BĂDOIU (78692) 155 (12.7%) Simon Kuenzer 127 (10.4%) Felipe Huici 98 (8.0%) Yuri Volchkov 75 (6.1%) Sharan Santhanam 74 (6.0%) Florian Schmidt 69 (5.6%) Jia He 60 (4.9%) Wei Chen 45 (3.7%) Mihai Pogonaru 37 (3.0%) Gaulthier Gain 36 (2.9%) Cristian Banu 31 (2.5%) Charalampos Mainas 29 (2.4%) Roxana Nicolescu 28 (2.3%) Jianyong Wu 15 (1.2%) Andrei Gogonea 12 (1.0%) Hugo Lefeuvre 11 (0.9%) Bogdan Lascu 10 (0.8%) Teodora Serbanescu 8 (0.7%) Stefan Teodorescu 8 (0.7%) Santiago Pagani 8 (0.7%) Alexander Jung 7 (0.6%) Haibo Xu 7 (0.6%)
In addition, we would like to thank all of the reviewers who spent significant amounts of time upstreaming code to Unikraft:
Felipe Huici 356 (33.3%) Costin Lupu 189 (17.7%) Simon Kuenzer 158 (14.8%) Sharan Santhanam 90 (8.4%) Vlad-Andrei BĂDOIU (78692) 61 (5.7%) Florian Schmidt 56 (5.2%) Stefan Teodorescu 39 (3.6%) Roxana Nicolescu 27 (2.5%) Gaulthier Gain 24 (2.2%) Santiago Pagani 19 (1.8%) Charalampos Mainas 17 (1.6%) Yuri Volchkov 13 (1.2%) Jia He 11 (1.0%) Mihai Pogonaru 5 (0.5%) Alexander Jung 3 (0.3%) Julien Grall 1 (0.1%)
Beyond the features of this 0.4 Rhea release, we are excited to give you a sneak peek into the features that are likely to make it into the next release:
- Additional external platform support (e.g., Amazon Firecracker)
- Bare metal support (ARM64/Raspberry Pi and others)
- OCI/Docker support: have Unikraft generate extremely specialized containers
- Binary compatibility: run unmodified Linux ELFs directly on Unikraft
Finally, the Unikraft team’s Simon Kuenzer recently gave a talk at FOSDEM titled “Unikraft: A Unikernel Toolkit”. Simon, a senior systems researcher at NEC Labs and the lead maintainer of Unikraft, spoke all about Unikraft and provided a comprehensive overview of the project, where it’s been and what’s in store.
Want to learn more about Unikraft and connect with the Xen community at large? Registration for the annual Xen Project Developer and Design Summit is open now! Check out information on sponsorships, speaking opportunities and more here.
