Kicking off 2022 with a new site and release at FOSDEM!

As the new year begins, we're excited to show off many of the things the community has been working over the last two months.

As the new year begins, we're excited to show off many of the things the community has been working over the last two months. It's become a tradition now that Unikraft celebrates a new release at FOSDEM'22, and we've come a long way since our initial release at FOSDEM'18.

New release v0.7 (Mimas)#

Unikraft has released v0.7 (Mimas) -- only 2 months after the last! This is an important milestone for the project as we start to speed up the reviewing, testing, merging and releasing of components of the Unikraft ecosystem. We have come a long way from using patchwork, and have introduced functionality on top of Github to help with the project's rigorous review process -- there are a lot of moving parts which are becoming automated (see the talk on the CI/CD system by below).

Apart from bug fixes, improvements and version updates, Unikraft Release v0.7 Mimas adds core features to support its development and deployment, including:

• lib/ukrust: Internal Rust support, allowing the development of internal libraries in Rust
• The documentation site has been revamped with extensive information on Unikraft architecture, usage, internals and development model.
• Multiple ARM features, such as SMCCC support, ns16550 driver, GICv3 have been added.
• Application README files have been updated with detailed instructions on configuring, building and running Unikraft applications.

For more details on this release, please check out the release page.

Unikraft VSCode Extension#

A Visual Studio Code extension allowing developers to get the full benefits of the IDE when working on Unikraft source code.

The Unikraft VSCode Extension extension facilitates the development of Unikraft applications and libraries (both external and internal). A big thank you to Adina Smeu who was the primary contributor to this project.

To get started using it, please visit the related repository at https://github.com/unikraft/ide-vscode

Unikraft at FOSDEM'22#

And of course, we have four talks this year at FOSDEM all about unikernels, including:

• Debugging and Monitoring in Unikraft: Everything beyond printf()

  by Simon Kuenzer & Marc Rittinghaus (NEC Laboratories Europe & KIT)

• Rethinking the OS for Isolation Flexibility with FlexOS

  by Hugo Lefeuvre & Jan Tobias Muehlberg (The University of Manchester & imec-DistriNet Researchc Group, KU Leuven)

• Massive Unikernel Matrices with Unikraft, Concourse and More!

  by Alexander Jung (Unikraft UG (haftungsbeschränkt))

• Unikraft Performance Monitoring with Prometheus

  by Cezar Crăciunoiu (University Politehnica of Bucharest)

You can view previous talks at FOSDEM here.

Acknowledgements#

A big thank you to the contributors to this release as mentioned above as well as those those who helped populate the documentation site: Răzvan Vîrtan, Stefan Jumarea, Cezar Craciunoiu, Fredrik Bakken, Dragos Iulian Argint, Gabriel Mocanu, Felipe Huici and Răzvan Deaconescu. Some of the new content of this documentation site has been gathered from Unikraft's Summer of Code (2021).