Abstract
It is no secret that certain applications, such as firewalls, routers, and hardened web services, perform best on BSD systems. Yet Linux dominates cloud infrastructure, forcing users to either port these applications or run them as full BSD virtual machines, each requiring special handling and management. This talk presents urunc, a container runtime for unikernels and single-application kernels that enables BSD workloads to run efficiently in Linux environments. urunc executes BSD applications in tiny microVMs and software-based sandboxes while integrating them seamlessly with existing Linux container platforms. This allows Kubernetes and similar systems to manage BSD workloads alongside Linux containers without extra effort or special handling. A live demo will walk through building, packaging, and deploying BSD applications with urunc, with initial performance metrics on startup time and network throughput, showing that BSD applications remain practical even in BSD-“hostile” environments.
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Charalampos Mainas
Systems Researcher
PhD candidate focusing on low-level systems programming, Linux kernel development, hypervisors (KVM, Xen) and unikernel runtime ecosystems.
Anastassios Nanos
Systems Researcher
My research interests include Systems software, virtualization, Operating Systems, Containers, unikernels etc.