clupuishere/cloning-apps

Applications for showcasing cloning support on unikernels

Applications for showcasing Nephele

This repo wraps a range of applications that can be used for testing and evaluating the Nephele cloning solution for unikernel-based VMs. The applications run on Mini-OS and Unikraft unikernels, but also as Linux processes. Based on the build configuration, a binary image can run one or more of the following:

• counter
• simple UDP server used in the instantiation and memory consumption microbenchmarks of Nephele
• simple TCP server
• measure-fork was used for measuring the fork() duration for different memory sizes in the Nephele paper
• memory-overhead measures the overhead added by Nephele for memory accesses after cloning a parent guest
• files tests the cloning support for 9pfs
• children is a fork server that waits for incoming requests to clone

How to build

Mini-OS

Our modified Mini-OS can be built together with the cloning applications by setting the CLONING_APPS_DIR and APP environment variables. For a thorough example, please check the build.sh script in our experiments repo. To build a Mini-OS image, run the following command in the Mini-OS tree:

make <other parameters ..>  CLONING_APPS_DIR=<path> APP=server-udp

Unikraft

The current tree is created also as a regular Unikraft application tree, providing the files needed for building it as Unikraft application: Config.uk, Makefile.uk and Makefile.unikraft. Thus the following command will built the binary image for Unikraft guests:

make -f Makefile.unikraft

You should use the Unikraft kernel modified for Nephele and the libraries (e.g., pthread-embedded, newlib, lwip, mimalloc) provided by our Unikraft-related repositories. The build.sh script in our experiments repo builds both Mini-OS and Unikraft images by running:

./build.sh guests

Linux

To build for Linux, run:

make -f Makefile.linux