From the paper, "the main advantage of unikernels over traditional operating systems is their low resource consumption." To demonstrate this, we evaluated the image size of 4 representative applications in Unikraft. This figure shows that "Unikraft images are all under 2MBs for all of these applications."
This experiment tests 4 configurations:
- Default configuration;
- with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO);
- with Dead Code Elimination (DCE); and,
- with DCE and LTO,
against 4 Unikraft unikernels:
- A simple "Hello World" C program;
- NGINX;
- SQlite; and,
- Redis.
These image permutations are constructed using
kraft via a Dockerfile.
N.B. You may need to set UK_KRAFT_GITHUB_TOKEN as a prefix to make docker in the top-level directory if you are rate-limited by kraft, e.g.:
DOCKER_BUILD_EXTRA="--build-arg UK_KRAFT_GITHUB_TOKEN=<mytoken>" make docker-kraft
| Target | Estimated time |
|---|---|
make docker |
2m 24s |
make helloworld |
2m 18s |
make redis |
22m 48s |
make sqlite |
20m 48s |
make nginx |
27m 7s |