Unikraft is Green & Efficient
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).
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.