A binary-compatible unikernel

Olivier, Pierre; Chiba, Daniel; Lankes, Stefan; Min, Changwoo; Ravindran, Binoy

doi:10.1145/3313808.3313817

Cited by 44 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Such a model brings significant benefits in several domains [34], in particular in terms of performance [19,25,34]: due to the elimination of kernel/user separation, system calls can be replaced with regular function calls. This significantly reduces system call latency, as there is no longer a costly world switch between privilege levels [25]; expensive operations such as page table switching [34] are eliminated. As a result, unikernels have been shown to outperform traditional OSes in system intensive workloads [11].…”

Section: Unikernel and Isolationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several unikernels' OS layers are written in memory safe languages [9,24,29,51]. This offers strong security guarantees compared to unikernels written in unsafe languages such C/C++ [18,19,25,34]. However, even memory-safe unikernels rely on untrusted components to realize the low-level operations that are unavoidable in an OS context: the use of inline assembly and the need to dereference raw pointers.…”

Section: Unikernel and Isolationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Group 14 52th 49th 0x3C7000 0x3C6000 0x3C5000 0x3A4000 0x3A3000 outlined in [34]. RustyHermit is composed of about 20k LoC, including 650 lines of unsafe code [24].…”

Section: Rustyhermitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, a unikernel instance running an application alongside the unikernel's Library Operating System (LibOS) possess a single and unprotected address space. Because of this particularity, it is possible for unikernels to present interesting opportunities for performance benefits, such as replacing traditional system calls with regular function calls [11,34] so that significant mode switch overhead [45] can be avoided. However, from a security perspective, a single and unprotected address space makes it so that the entire unikernel must be viewed as a single unit of trust.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intra-unikernel isolation with Intel memory protection keys

Sung

Olivier

Lankes

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

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Unikernels are minimal, single-purpose virtual machines. This new operating system model promises numerous benefits within many application domains in terms of lightweightness, performance, and security. Although the isolation between unikernels is generally recognized as strong, there is no isolation within a unikernel itself. This is due to the use of a single, unprotected address space, a basic principle of unikernels that provide their lightweightness and performance benefits. In this paper, we propose a new design that brings memory isolation inside a unikernel instance while keeping a single address space. We leverage Intel's Memory Protection Key to do so without impacting the lightweightness and performance benefits of unikernels. We implement our isolation scheme within an existing unikernel written in Rust and use it to provide isolation between trusted and untrusted components: we isolate (1) safe kernel code from unsafe kernel code and (2) kernel code from user code. Evaluation shows that our system provides such isolation with very low performance overhead. Notably, the unikernel with our isolation exhibits only 0.6% slowdown on a set of macrobenchmarks.

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Section: Unikernel and Isolationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unikernel and Isolationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Group 14 52th 49th 0x3C7000 0x3C6000 0x3C5000 0x3A4000 0x3A3000 outlined in [34]. RustyHermit is composed of about 20k LoC, including 650 lines of unsafe code [24].…”

Section: Rustyhermitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Intra-unikernel isolation with Intel memory protection keys

Sung

Olivier

Lankes

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

Self Cite

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“…However, the compatibility to common OSs (e. g., Linux) is currently still limited. HermiTux [38] has similar objectives and realizes compatibility to Linux by rewriting system calls and using a modified C library. However, the compatibility of HermiTux is limited as not all Linux system calls have been re-implemented.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Rust for Unikernel Development

Lankes

Breitbart

Pickartz

2019

Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

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System-level development has been dominated by programming languages like C / C++ for decades. These languages are inherently unsafe, error-prone, and a major reason for vulnerabilities. High-level programming languages with a secure memory model and strong type system are able to improve the quality of the system software. In this paper, we explore the programming language Rust for kernel development and present RustyHermit, which is a unikernel completely written in Rust without any C / C++. We show that the support for RustyHermit can be transparently integratable in the Rust toolchain and common Rust applications are build-able on top of RustyHermit. Previously, we developed the C-based unikernel HermitCore with a similar design to RustyHermit and we are able to compare both kernels. We show that the performance of both kernels is similar and only~3.27 % of RustyHermit relies on unsafe code, that cannot be checked by the compiler in detail.

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