Linaro Virtual Connect 2020

Raspberry Pis have been there like forever, and have sold like hot cakes for 8 years now. Lots of people have done very ambitious projects (self-driving robots, anyone?), and new ideas and projects surface every day. Be it building a supercomputer by stacking lots of SBCs, a bitcoin miner, a brewery system, home automation, a weather station, or any crazy idea, the only limit seems to be your imagination.

Of course, these little beasts can also be used as servers. For years, Docker has been used only on big servers, but after resin.io ported Docker to the Arm processor, everything changed.

Pretty cool to be able to run Docker on that kind of mini machines, but what kind of service could you run on Docker with so little memory? Lots of things in fact…

And what if you could get the best of both worlds? What could you do with a machine able to interact with hardware (🌡️, 📹 , 🚦) thanks to Docker? Could you transform your Raspberry Pi into an edge computing node, an IoT on steroids 💪 , or anything in between?

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 .