Optimizing Boot Times and Enhancing Binary Compatibility for Unikernels

Unikernels are lightweight, single-purpose virtual machines designed for the cloud. They provide enhanced security, minimal resource utilisation, fast boot times, and the ability to optimize performance for the target application. Despite their numerous advantages, unikernels face significant barriers to their widespread adoption. We identify two such obstacles as unscalable boot procedures in hypervisors and the difficulty in porting native applications to unikernel models. This work presents a solution for the first based on the popular Xen hypervisor, and demonstrates a significant performance benefit when running a large number of guest VMs. The HermiTux unikernel aims to overcome the second obstacle by providing the ability to run unmodified binaries as unikernels. This work adds to HermiTux, enabling it to retain some of the important advantages of unikernels such as fast system calls and modularity.

Name thesis:degree_name

MS

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Chiba, Daniel Juzer

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ravindran, Binoy

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Min, Chang Woo
• Broadwater, Robert P.

• Virtualization
• Unikernel
• Hypervisor

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:16372

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/88865