Unikraft Hacktoberfest '22

As tradition dictates, if it's Saturday then it is definitely another hackathon we are proud to host at Unikraft. Even so, the last one was a bit special.

How you ask?

Well, as we previously announced, we have been officially accepted to be part of the Hacktoberfest 2022.

Thus UNIKRAFT HACKTOBERFEST '22 was born in the shape of a hybrid event. Here both familiar faces and newcomers alike came together physically at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest or joined remotely on the Unikraft Discord server in order to test their knowledge to unikernels.

First Steps#

In order to break the ice, our documentation community lead, Stefan Jumărea, gave an introductory presentation. This aimed to present both unikernels and Unikraft to the participants, introducing it to the newcomers and refreshing it for the veterans. Afterward, a short discussion about the challenges raised our participants spirits. Onto krafting young padawans!

Hardwork Always Pays Off#

It was finally time for the moment we have been waiting for, the deep dive into the tasks. In order to warm up and close the gap between traditional applications and Unikraft, most of the participants chose to run static PIE Linux executables on top of Unikraft in binary compatibility mode using the ELF Loader. The more experienced ones adventured even deeper and added new ones.

In their aid USOC '22 tutorials also played a great role, allowing participants to have a better understanding of the core components of Unikraft.

While beginnings can sometimes be challenging and unrewarding, this was not the case for our contestants. After a few hours, the results were on the table: 3 applications were ported as static PIE apps for Unikraft. A great start! But wait, there's more! The participants continued working on their porting and submitted their PRs. To our surprise we even had some PRs submitted even the next day!

Conclusion#

We hope you enjoyed Unikraft Hacktoberfest '22 as much as we did and would be happy to see you involved more in our community soon.

Happy hacking for the rest of the October! 🎃

Participants for Hacktoberfest at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest