Session Abstract
Increasingly, embedded devices are being equipped with ARM processors. Because of ease-of-use and widespread support for drivers and applications, Linux is often used as the OS of choice even though it consumes a significant amount of the device’s limited resources, and its large Trusted Compute Base (TCB) has resulted in a plethora of exploits. In this talk, we will present Unikraft, a fully micro-library operating system and build tool which allows for building specialized OSes and software stacks targeting one application, while removing unneeded functionality. As a proof of concept, we port Unikraft to the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and to a Xilinx Ultra96-V2. On these boards, Unikraft is able to boot in 88-158 milliseconds, consume only hundreds of KBs of memory when running real-world applications such as NGINX and ML frameworks such as PyTorch, while providing visible reductions in power consumption compared to Linux distributions. Unikraft is a Linux Foundation open source project and can be found at www.unikraft.org .
Session Speakers
Felipe Huici
Chief Researcher, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH
I’m a chief researcher in the systems group at NEC Laboratories Europe in Heidelberg, Germany. My main research and work interests lie in the areas of high-performance software systems, and in particular specialization, virtualization, and the application of machine learning techniques to tackle open problems in the systems area. Previously, I received an undergraduate degree with honours from the University of Virginia, a Masters in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London (top of the class), and a Ph.D. also from UCL. I have published on several top-tier conferences and journals such as SOSP, SIGCOMM, NSDI, CoNEXT, and SIGCOMM CCR and regularly act as TPC member of conferences and journals such as IMC , INFOCOM, CoNEXT and SIGCOMM CCR.
