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Lupine: Linux in Unikernel Clothes

NOTE

The container image for building the kernel (Linux 4.0) is not available anymore but you can use an older Ubuntu image to build it. We use apline-variant applications that use musl-libc for our benchmarks. PRs are welcomed!

Paper

@inproceedings{10.1145/3342195.3387526,
author = {Kuo, Hsuan-Chi and Williams, Dan and Koller, Ricardo and Mohan, Sibin},
  title = {A Linux in Unikernel Clothing},
  year = {2020},
  isbn = {9781450368827},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3342195.3387526},
  doi = {10.1145/3342195.3387526},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on Computer Systems},
  articleno = {Article 11},
  numpages = {15},
  location = {Heraklion, Greece},
  series = {EuroSys ’20}
}

In this project, we manually configure the Linux kernel so that it becomes as small as 4+MB. We aim to show that it has the following unikernel properties

  • no mode switching (by KML)
  • specialization (by Kconfig)
  • size (by evaluation)
  • efficiency in terms of boot time and memory density (by evaluation)

Contribution

  • a combination of existing Linux configuration specialization and KML for a first-step Linux unikernel
  • an evaluation of what unikernel properties are achieved
  • a discussion of common unikernel tradeoffs (e.g., no smp, no fork) and their impact
  • highlighting next steps for Linux specialization/ cross domain optimization

Setup

  1. Clone project: git clone https://github.com/hckuo/Lupine-Linux.git

  2. Update submodule: git submodule update --init

  3. Pull a docker image that contains the environment for building Linux 4.0 kernel, and create a tag linuxbuild:latest. Run the below commands:

    • docker pull a74731248/linuxbuild:latest
    • docker tag a74731248/linuxbuild:latest linuxbuild:latest

  4. Run make command in the content load_entropy to generate load_entropy file

  5. Build the Lupine unikernel of your interest by following one of the below steps:

    • run sh scripts/build-kernels.sh
    • run sh scripts/build-with-configs.sh configs/<specific_config> <app_config>
      For Eg: sh scripts/build-with-configs.sh configs/lupine-djw-kml.config configs/apps/nginx.config

  6. Build rootfs: sh image2rootfs.sh app tag ext2, the tag must be alpine, because Lupine use musl libc rather than glibc. Example: sh image2rootfs.sh nginx alpine ext2

Run Lupine-Linux

In Firecraker

  • run sh firecrackerd.sh in first shell
  • run sh firecracker-run.sh <path_to_kernel> <path_to_rootfs> init=<init_script> in second shell, the init can be /bin/sh or some scripts that you want to run after Lupine boots up.

In QEMU

  • Make sure to build your kernel with the follwing options turned on:
    • CONFIG_PCI=y
    • CONFIG_VIRTIO_PCI=y
  • Once built you can run using the following command: qemu-system-x86_64 -no-reboot -kernel <path_to_kernel> -drive "file=<path_to_root_fs>,format=raw,if=none,id=hd0" -nographic -nodefaults -serial stdio -device virtio-blk-pci,id=blk0,drive=hd0,scsi=off -append "panic=-1 console=ttyS0 root=/dev/vda rw loglevel=15 nokaslr init=<init_script>

Files

scripts
|-- build-kernels.sh (build all kernels for helloworld, redis and ngnix for all variants)
|-- firecrackerd.sh (wrapper firecracker daeomn)
|-- firecracker-run.sh (wrapper of firecrakcer client)
|-- image2rootfs.sh (create userspace root fs from docker image)
|-- firecracker-lz4bench-run.sh (runs lz4 bench as a firecracker microvm lupine+kml+mmio)
`-- run-helper.sh (shared variables and helper functions)

Theses scripts should be executed at the root directory.

Takeaways:

  • don't rewrite Linux unikernel people!
  • know what unikernel benefits you really care about and what you give up to get them
  • future work should be on app manifests LTO, etc.

Going forward beyond unikernel restrictions

  • smp vs. non-smp
    • smp gives speed benefits, esp when CPU bound
    • may cause size overhead (different config)?
  • fork vs. non-fork
    • same as smp just may add context switches (show in microbenchmark)
  • (how many applications use fork?)
  • dynamic linking vs. static
  • with KML unikernel properties "gracefully degrade"