Unikernel


A unikernel is a specialised, single address space machine image constructed by using library operating systems. A developer selects, from a modular stack, the minimal set of libraries which correspond to the OS constructs required for their application to run. These libraries are then compiled with the application and configuration code to build sealed, fixed-purpose images which run directly on a hypervisor or hardware without an intervening OS such as Linux or Windows.
The first such systems were Exokernel and Nemesis in the late 1990s.

Design

In a library operating system, protection boundaries are pushed to the lowest hardware layers, resulting in:
  1. a set of libraries that implement mechanisms such as those needed to drive hardware or talk network protocols;
  2. a set of policies that enforce access control and isolation in the application layer.
The library OS architecture has several advantages and disadvantages compared with conventional OS designs. One of the advantages is that since there is only a single address space, there is no need for repeated privilege transitions to move data between user space and kernel space. Therefore, a library OS can provide improved performance by allowing direct access to hardware without having to transition between user mode and kernel mode. Performance gains may be realised by elimination of the need to copy data between user space and kernel space, although this is also possible with Zero-copy device drivers in traditional operating systems.
A disadvantage is that because there is no separation, trying to run multiple applications side by side in a library OS, but with strong resource isolation, can become complex. In addition, device drivers are required for the specific hardware the library OS runs on. Since hardware is rapidly changing this creates the burden of regularly rewriting drivers to remain up to date.
OS virtualization can overcome some of these drawbacks on commodity hardware. A modern hypervisor provides virtual machines with CPU time and strongly isolated virtual devices. A library OS running as a virtual machine only needs to implement drivers for these stable virtual hardware devices and can depend on the hypervisor to drive the real physical hardware. However, protocol libraries are still needed to replace the services of a traditional operating system. Creating these protocol libraries is where the bulk of the work lies when implementing a modern library OS. Additionally, reliance on a hypervisor may reintroduce performance overheads when switching between the unikernel and hypervisor, and when passing data to and from hypervisor virtual devices.
By reducing the amount of code deployed, unikernels necessarily reduce the likely attack surface and therefore have improved security properties.
Unikernels have been shown to be around 4% the size of the equivalent code bases using a traditional OS.
Due to the nature of their construction, it is possible to perform whole-system optimisation across device drivers and application logic, thus improving on the specialisation.
Unikernels have been regularly shown to boot extremely quickly, in time to respond to incoming requests before the requests time-out.
Unikernels lend themselves to creating systems that follow the service-oriented or microservices software architectures.
The high degree of specialisation means that unikernels are unsuitable for the kind of general purpose, multi-user computing that traditional operating systems are used for. Adding additional functionality or altering a compiled unikernel is generally not possible and instead the approach is to compile and deploy a new unikernel with the desired changes.

Examples

There are a number of new approaches to constructing unikernels, which are at varying degrees of maturity.