Unikraft Toolchain

Abstract

Until now, microservices have been run either on monolithic operating systems that are not at all suited to this new architecture, or in containers. However, a major new competitor could shake up the market: unikernels. More powerful, more secure and targeting one application at a time, they could well overshadow monolithic operating systems and containers. However, they have one major drawback: they are very difficult for developers to use.

This is where the Unikraft project really comes into its own. Eventually intended to provide an automated system for building specialised unikernels, Unikraft already provides a complete unikernel development kit to make developers' work easier. However, using this system is still a long way from what one would expect from an automated system. The Unikraft toolchain, a tool capable of analysing an application in detail and building the corresponding specialised unikernel, was developed with the aim of moving towards the much-coveted automated system. However, as the toolchain is still under heavy development, it suffers from many bugs and is not yet capable of automatically producing specialised unikernels.

In this work, the various tools that make up toolchain were put to the test with the aim of porting (i.e. producing a specialised unikernel targeting the application the Unikraft way) as many applications as possible to Unikraft and gradually improving the toolchain. Each application, or almost each application, revealed shortcomings. Numerous bugs were discovered and fixed in the dependency analysis, build and extracter tools. New functionalities were also added to the dependency analysis and build tools. The applications were successfully ported after these improvements were made, even if they were not fully automatically ported. Indeed, one must admit that it may not always be possible to port applications automatically because of their uniqueness.