Efficiency

In addition to being highly performant, it has been demonstrated that Unikraft consumes less power than typical monolithic (traditional) Operating Systems such as Linux.

As a proof of concept, we have ported Unikraft to the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and the Xilinx Ultra96-V2 devices. We compare Unikraft with off-the-shelf Alpine Linux and Raspbian OS as well as a specialized, stripped down Raspbian (removing non-essential build tools, system packages and docs).

We evaluate power consumption versus Linux when idle and when running a CPU-intensive calculation of π (see figure below); as shown, Unikraft can provide important power reduction in both scenarios in comparison to Linux (running only on a single core and with networking modules disabled, for fair comparison).

Figure 1: Rasberry Pi power use with Unikraft vs. Alpine and Raspbian when idle and when calculating π

Note that while these tests were run on small ARM devices, the efficiency gains would also translate to power reduction on larger devices such as servers.

Read more about how Unikraft was evaluated in terms of energy consumption in the IEEE 2020 International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) publication.