fig_10_unikraft-boot

Boot time of Unikraft with different VMMs

From the paper, "the main advantage of unikernels over traditional operating systems is their low resource consumption. ... Small image sizes are not only useful for minimizing disk storage, but also to enable quick boot times for VMs based on those images. LightVM has shown that it is possible to boot a no-op unikernel in around 2ms, with a heavily optimized Xen toolstack. In our evaluation, we use standard virtualization toolstacks instead, and wish to understand how quickly Unikraft VMs can boot. When running experiments, we measure both the time taken by the VMM (e.g. Firecracker, QEMU, Solo5) and the boot time of the actual unikernel/VM, measured from when the first guest instruction is run until main() is invoked. The results are shown in [this figure], showing how long a helloworld unikernel needs to boot with different VMMs. Note that Unikraft's boot time (only the guest, without VMM overheads) ranges from tens to hundreds of microseconds when the VM has no devices, and up to 1ms when the VM has one networking interface."

Usage

• ./genimages.sh downloads and builds the tested images anm takes about 2m on average;
• ./benchmark.sh runs the experiment and takes about 6m30s in average; and
• ./plot.py is used to generate the figure.

Note: like fig_14, this experiment relies on Unikraft tracepoints. Please refer to its README.md for further information.