Linaro Virtual Connect 2020

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 .