Bringing BSD Applications on Linux container platforms with urunc
K.3.201 | Day 1 | 17:15 - 17:40 | Speakers: Charalampos Mainas, Anastassios Nanos
Abstract
It is no secret that certain applications, such as firewalls, routers, and hardened web services, perform best on BSD systems. Yet Linux dominates cloud infrastructure, forcing users to either port these applications or run them as full BSD virtual machines, each requiring special handling and management. This talk presents urunc, a container runtime for unikernels and single-application kernels that enables BSD workloads to run efficiently in Linux environments. urunc executes BSD applications in tiny microVMs and software-based sandboxes while integrating them seamlessly with existing Linux container platforms. This allows Kubernetes and similar systems to manage BSD workloads alongside Linux containers without extra effort or special handling. A live demo will walk through building, packaging, and deploying BSD applications with urunc, with initial performance metrics on startup time and network throughput, showing that BSD applications remain practical even in BSD-“hostile” environments.
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Speakers
Charalampos Mainas is a systems software engineer who is very interested in virtualization technologies and operating systems. His main focus is on finding ways to improve the performance and scalability of lightweight VMMs. A significant portion of his work has been dedicated on Unikernels, including porting applications, libraries, and language runtimes, with an emphasis on enhancing their compatibility with existing technologies. In that context, he leads the development of bunny and urunc, which allow users to simply docker build and docker run unikernels and similar technologies.
I am a Researcher in Computer Systems and I am currently working on the lower-level parts of the stack to attack issues related to performance, scalability, power-efficiency and security in hypervisors.
Since 2015 I have been affiliated with UK & EU firms, building & architecting solutions for efficient execution of workloads in the Cloud and at the Edge. I have been involved in many parts of the systems software stack, including device drivers, memory management, network/block layers etc.
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