Unikraft
Automatically deploy lightweight VMs with 20-50% savings with Unikraft Cloud.

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).

RPI Unikraft power use vs. Alpine and Raspbian when idle and when calculating π
Unikraft low energy consumption: RPI Unikraft power use 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.