Introduction to Unikernels and Unikraft

We go over the basics of unikernels, their purpose and the motivation behind building unikernels with the library Operating System model. We present the setup we use for the hackathon and check everything is OK before proceeding to actual work items. Expected time: 15 minutes

Introduction to Unikernels and Unikraft#

Unikraft is a Unikernel Development Kit and consists of an extensive build system in addition to core and external library ecosystem which facilitate the underlying functionality of a unikernel. It is built as an open-source project and does so in the context of a vibrant community consisting of highly skilled software engineers, researchers, teachers, students and hobbyists. As a community, its outreach consists of over 50 active contributors, 12 peer-reviewed academic publications, in 10 institutes, in 6 countries.

To find out more about Unikraft, checkout the concepts page, documentation and join Discord. Please also star the main Unikraft repository.

Prerequisites#

You should have basic knowledge of the following items:

• Linux CLI: working with the filesystem, running commands, documentation
• C programming language
• Git: a very good tutorial on Git is Git Immersion
• GitHub
• Operating system concepts (processes, memory management, working with files, networking)
• virtualization