StardustOS: Library operating system for building light-weight Unikernels

Summary

Stardust is a unikernel operating system designed to run Cloud applications in a protected, single-address space environment. It delegates the management of physical resources to an underlying hypervisor which is treated as a trusted platform. Stardust has a small code base that can be maintained easily, and relies on static linking to combine a minimal kernel with a single application, along with the libraries and associated programming language run-time required for the execution of the application. Due to static linking, an executable binary of Stardust is packaged within an immutable single-purpose virtual machine image. Stardust supports multiple cores, preemptive threads, and basic block and networking drivers, and provides a collection of standard POSIX-compatible libraries. Stardust is being used in supporting the teaching and research activities at the University of St Andrews. Stardust provides the unikernel implementation in C. Stardust-oxide is a re-implementation of the unikernel in Rust. Duster provides a small debugger for para-virtualised Unikernels written in C that run on the Xen hypervisor. Jaradat, W., Dearle A. and Lewis, J. Unikernel Support for Lambda Functions. In the Fifth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2020. Accepted Talk Ahmad, K., Dearle A., Lewis, J. and Jaradat, W. Debugging Unikernel Operating Systems (Slides). In the Fifth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2020. Accepted Talk Jaradat, W. On Engineering Unikernels, Systems Seminars Series, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, 2018. Talk Jaradat, W., Dearle, A. and Lewis, J. Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services. In the Third Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2018. Talk Jaradat, W. Towards Unikernel Support for Distributed Microservices. Adobe Tech Summit, San Francisco, United States of America, 2019. Talk Jaradat, W., Dearle, A. a...