DevConf.US 2021

Unikernels, despite huge resource use, performance, boot time and security advantages have not seen widespread adoption when compared to Linux. Since most unikernels are written from scratch, this slow adoption can be attributed to lack of a battle tested code base, a large developer community, wide application compatibility, or rich device support. In this project, we explore if we can create a Linux based unikernel, which will inherit all of Linux's community and device and application support, while also providing performance advantages. Our prototype demonstrates that such an implementation is possible and has significant performance advantages over unmodified Linux. We show that this is possible through a small set of code changes and the potential for further performance benefits is large.