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Re: [Minios-devel] [RFC] Unicore Subproject Proposal



On Wed, 20 Sep 2017, Lars Kurth wrote:
> Felipe, Simon,
> a quick note to let you know that the Advisory Board in today’s AB meeting 
> decided to endorse your proposal.
> Let me know how you proceed: from my perspective, we can kick off a formal 
> vote before you make modifications to the proposal, but I think it is better 
> to post v2 first.

Congratulations!


 
> On 07/09/2017, 05:26, "Felipe Huici" <Felipe.Huici@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>     Dear all,
>     
>     Following up on discussions that Simon Kuenzer had with several of you at
>     the last Xen summit, we’re now submitting a Xen subproject proposal based
>     on our Unicore work. Could you please review it?
>     
>     Thanks,
>     
>     Felipe Huici & Simon Kuenzer - NEC Labs Heidelberg.
>     
>     
>     PROPOSAL: Unicore
>     =================
>     
>     Roles
>     -----
>     Project Leads: Simon Kuenzer <simon.kuenzer@xxxxxxxxx> (main lead)
>                    Felipe Huici  <felipe.huici@xxxxxxxxx>    (co-lead)
>                    Florian Schmidt <florian.schmidt@xxxxxxxxx> (co-lead)
>     Project Mentor:  Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxxxxx>
>     Project Sponsor: -To be found-
>     
>     Background
>     ----------
>     In recent years, several papers and projects dedicated to unikernels have
>     shown the immense potential for performance gains that these have. By
>     leveraging specialization and the use of minimalistic OSes, unikernels are
>     able to yield impressive numbers, including fast instantiation times (tens
>     of milliseconds or less), tiny memory footprints (a few MBs or even KBs),
>     high network throughput (10-40 Gb/s), and high consolidation (e.g., being
>     able to run thousands of instances on a single commodity server), not to
>     mention a reduced attack surface and the potential for easier
>     certification. Unikernel projects worthy of mention include MirageOS,
>     ClickOS, Erlang on Xen, OSv, HALVM, and Minicache, among others.
>     
>     The fundamental drawback of unikernels is that they require that
>     applications be manually ported to the underlying minimalistic OS (e.g.
>     having to port nginx, snort, mysql or memcached to MiniOS or OSv); this
>     requires both expert work and often considerable amount of time. In
>     essence, we need to pick between either high performance with unikernels,
>     or no porting effort but decreased performance and decreased efficiency
>     with standard OS/VM images. The goal of this proposal is to change this
>     status quo by providing a highly configurable unikernel code base; we call
>     this base Unicore.
>     
>     This project also aims to concentrate the various efforts currently going
>     on in the Xen community regarding minimalistic OSes (essentially different
>     variants of MiniOS). We think that splitting the community across these
>     variants is counter-productive and hope that Unicore will provide a common
>     place for all or most improvements and customizations of minimalistic
>     OSes. The long term goal is to replace something like MiniOS with a tool
>     that can automatically build such a minimalistic OS.
>     
>     Unicore - The "Unikernel Core"
>     ---------------------------------
>     The high level goal of Unicore is to be able to build unikernels targeted
>     at specific applications without requiring the time-consuming, expert work
>     that building such a unikernel requires today. An additional goal (or
>     hope) of Unicore is that all developers interested in unikernel
>     development would contribute by supplying libraries rather than working on
>     independent projects with different code bases as it is done now. The main
>     idea behind Unicore is depicted in Figure 1 and consists of two basic
>     components:
>      
>     
>     [Attachment: unicore-oneslider.pdf]
>     
>     
>     Figure 1. Unicore architecture.
>     
>      
>     Library pools would contain libraries that the user of Unicore can select
>     from to create the unikernel. From the bottom up, library pools are
>     organized into (1) the architecture library tool, containing libraries
>     specific to a computer architecture (e.g., x86_64, ARM32 or MIPS); (2) the
>     platform tool, where target platforms can be Xen, KVM, bare metal (i.e. no
>     virtualization) and user-space Linux; and (3) the main library pool,
>     containing a rich set of functionality to build the unikernel from. This
>     last library includes drivers (both virtual such as netback/netfront and
>     physical such as ixgbe), filesystems, memory allocators, schedulers,
>     network stacks, standard libs (e.g. libc, openssl, etc.), runtimes (e.g. a
>     Python interpreter and debugging and profiling tools. These pools of
>     libraries constitute a code base for creating unikernels. As shown, a
>     library can be relatively large (e.g libc) or quite small (a scheduler),
>     which should allow for a fair amount of customization for the unikernel.
>      
>     
>     The Unicore build tool is in charge of compiling the application and the
>     selected libraries together to create a binary for a specific platform and
>     architecture (e.g., Xen on x86_64). The tool is currently inspired by
>     Linux’s kconfig system and consists of a set of Makefiles. It allows users
>     to select libraries, to configure them, and to warn them when library
>     dependencies are not met. In addition, the tool can also simultaneously
>     generate binaries for multiple platforms.
>     
>      
>     As an example, imagine a user wanting to generate a network driver domain
>     unikernel. In this case, we would assume the “application” to be the
>     netback driver. To select this application, the user would first run “make
>     menuconfig” from within the netback application folder. The Makefile there
>     would set a variable to indicate what the application is, and would
>     include the main Unicore Makefiles so that the unikernel can be built
>     (Step 1 in the figure). Using the menu-based system, the user chooses the
>     relevant libraries; for a Xen driver domain this would include a physical
>     network driver, the netback driver, the libxenplat library and a library
>     from the architecture library pool such as libx86_64arch (Step 2 in the
>     figure). With this in place, the user saves the configuration and types
>     “make” to build the unikernel (Step 3) and xl create to run it (Step 4).
>     
>      
>     A note on the ABI/API: because Unicore allows for customization of the
>     unikernels, the ABI (or API since there is no kernel) would be custom,
>     that is, defined by the libraries the user selected. Having said that, it
>     would be perfectly possible, for instance, to build POSIX-compliant
>     unikernels with it.
>     
>     
>     Relevance to Xen and its Community
>     -----------------------------------
>     Unikernels are important to a number of areas relevant to the Xen
>     community, including IoT, automotive, stub domains and driver domain
>     disaggregation. Unicore could help boost the progress in all of these
>     areas by quickly providing the necessary tools to create  unikernels for
>     them. For instance, for a driver domain, the user would include the
>     “library” containing the relevant hardware driver and corresponding
>     back-end driver, and in principle Unicore would take care of the rest.
>     
>     In addition, Unicore could eventually replace Mini-OS, providing a
>     cleaner, more stable and flexible base from which to build unikernels for
>     projects (the modularization of Mini-OS is in fact already taking place).
>     
>     
>     Current Status
>     --------------
>     Unicore is at an early stage. For now it includes some base libraries with
>     code extracted from Mini-OS as well as a build tool inspired by
>     Linux's KConfig system. Unicore is currently able to build "hello world"
>     unikernels for Xen and Linux user space on x86_64 and ARMv7.
>     
>     Incubation
>     ----------
>     The reason behind making Unicore a Xen sub-project project is to (1) bring
>     the existence of Unicore to the attention of the Xen community
>     and to outside world; (2) to attempt to harness interest and potentially
>     development cycles from people and companies interested in
>     unikernels; and (3) to concentrate maintenance resources from people
>     interested in unikernels within the community.
>     
>     License
>     -------
>     The main license of the run-time components of Unicore will be a 3-clause
>     BSD license, unless there is a good reason not to use it (e.g. we may
>     import 2-clause BSD licensed code from Mini-OS, which we would *not*
>     anticipate to change). The Makefile system would be licensed under GPL v2
>     or later as we want to be able to use KConfig functionality from
>     Buildroot/Linux.
>     
>     Required Infrastructure
>     -----------------------
>     The official repositories should be created on
>     [http://xenbits.xenproject.org/] under `unicore.git`. There should be a
>     main repository for the core unicore implementation and additional
>     repositories for some more advanced extension libraries (e.g., lwIP,
>     newlib).
>     
>     ### Main repository
>     
>     `unicore.git`
>     
>     ### Repositories for extension libraries
>     
>     Repositories for additional libraries that are supported by the Unicore
>     project should exist under a separate directory:
>     
>     `unicore-libs/`
>     
>     For example:
>     
>     `unicore-libs/lwip.git`
>     `unicore-libs/newlib.git`
>     
>     ### Mailing list
>     
>     In the beginning we would use the MiniOS mailing list
>     (minios-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). When we get traction with Unicore we
>     could consider splitting that traffic onto a unicore mailing list.
>     
>     
>     
>     
>     ============================================================
>     Dr. Felipe Huici
>     Chief Researcher, Networked Systems and Data
>     Analytics Group
>     NEC Laboratories Europe, Network Research Division
>     Kurfuerstenanlage 36, D-69115 Heidelberg
>     Tel.     +49
>     (0)6221 4342-241
>     Fax:     +49
>     (0)6221 4342-155
>     
>     e-mail: 
>     felipe.huici@xxxxxxxxx
>     ============================================================
>     NEC Europe Limited Registered Office: NEC House, 1
>     Victoria Road, London W3 6BL Registered in England 2832014
>     
>     
>     
> 
> 
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