Running Unikraft on KVM

KVM is a hypervisor. This means that, when Unikraft is run on KVM, it acts as an operating system, having the responsibility to configure the hardware components it needs. In contrast, linuxu involves Unikraft behaving as a Linux userspace application. When run on KVM, Unikraft has direct and total control over hardware components, allowing advanced functionalities.

QEMU

A common way to run Unikraft on KVM is to use QEMU. QEMU which is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) and simply manages the lifecycle of the VM. QEMU can be used on its own to run Unikraft, but this involves emulating all the hardware resources in software, making everything slower. However, QEMU has the option to enable hardware acceleration – aka (para)virtualization – using the underlying software platform, that is, KVM.

Build and run Unikraft on KVM using kraft

In order to configure a Unikraft image to target the KVM platform, we simply select one of the KVM images at the configuration step, according to the target architecture (ARM64 or x86_64):

$ kraft configure

[?] Which target would you like to configure?: helloworld_kvm-x86_64
   helloworld_linuxu-x86_64
 > helloworld_kvm-x86_64
   helloworld_xen-x86_64
   helloworld_linuxu-arm64
   helloworld_kvm-arm64
   helloworld_linuxu-arm

After this step, kraft build and kraft run should work the same.

By default, what kraft run does behind the scenes is to check if the host machine architecture is the same as the target one. If they are the same, hardware acceleration is used. If not, it is automatically disabled.

Build and run Unikraft on KVM using make and qemu

You can also build and run Unikraft on KVM by using the Makefile method (basically, reproducing the internals of kraft). This could be useful in the development stage.

In this section, we suppose you already have an application directory with a Makefile and Makefile.uk, as described in the Advanced section.

For the configuration step, run make menuconfig, go to Architecture selection -> Architecture and select one of the 3 alternatives. Then, go to Platform Configuration and select KVM guest.

After creating the configuration, exit the configuration menu and build the image using make.

In order to run, you need to load the resulting image in QEMU by using:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
    --nographic \
    -kernel ./build/app-helloworld_kvm-x86_64

Besides --nographic, no other option is needed to run the helloworld application.

More complex applications will require more options given to QEMU.

We have run Unikraft in the emulation mode, with the command from above. We can also run it in the virtualization mode, by adding the -enable-kvm option. You may receive a warning, host doesn't support requested feature:. This is because kvm uses a generic CPU model. You can instruct kvm to use your local CPU model, by adding -cpu host to the command. The final command will look like this:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
    --nographic \
    -kernel ./build/app-helloworld_kvm-x86_64 \
    -enable-kvm \
    -cpu host

In order to run an ARM64 image on a x86 host, you will need to provide qemu some additional arguments: the machine and cpu type. Here is a full command that runs an ARM64 image:

$ qemu-system-aarch64 \
    --nographic \
    -machine virt \
    -cpu cortex-a57 \
    -kernel build/app-helloworld_kvm-arm64

If you want to see available machine types, you can use:

$ qemu-system-aarch64 -machine help

If you want to see available cpu types for a specific machine, run:

$ qemu-system-aarch64 -machine <machine type> -cpu help

Please note that not every machine-cpu combination will work with Unikraft. Also, if you run an ARM64 image on a x86 host, you won’t be able to use the -enable-kvm option.

Using qemu-guest to run Unikraft on KVM

qemu-guest is a useful script used by kraft to run its QEMU/KVM images. You can find it in the kraft Git repo, in scripts/. What qemu-guest does is taking a simple list of arguments from the user and generate a more complex qemu-system command. Here is the qemu-guest command for running app-helloworld on x86_64:

$ ./qemu-guest -k build/app-helloworld_kvm-x86_64

If we add the -D option, we can see the generated qemu-system command.

qemu-guest offers all kind of options, just like qemu-system does. For instance, you can mount a file system using the -e option. You can run ./qemu-guest -help to find the option you need for a specific use case.

By default, qemu-guest enables hardware acceleration. To disable it, we can use -W. Here is the qemu-guest command for running the ARM64 version of app-helloworld on a x86_64 host:

$ ./qemu-guest -t arm64v -W -k build/app-helloworld_kvm-arm64