Exploring Unikernel: An Empirical Comparison With Linux
summary
Empirical comparison runs the same C app with musl on two Xen guests (ARM64) and measures build time, image size, and syscall/library latency with 5,000 iterations, Trace32 disassembly, and top‑1% outlier removal. Unikraft builds in 22 seconds producing a <2 MB binary versus Linux’s ~10.5 minute build producing a 90 MB kernel + 8.7 MB rootfs. Assembly inspection explains latency: clock_gettime Linux 70 ns vs Unikraft 120 ns, getpid 577 ns vs 214 ns, mmap 6,100 ns vs 1,400 ns — 4.4× faster for mmap on Unikraft.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Unikernel vs Linux intro
- 1:27Why explore Unikernels
- 3:35UniCraft architecture
- 8:13Experimental setup
- 10:20Comparison metrics
- 11:01Build time and size
- 12:04Latency measurement
- 13:49Clock get time analysis
- 15:58String and copy performance
- 16:40Get PID comparison
- 18:09Memory map deep dive
- 21:46Performance summary
- 22:07Conclusion and tradeoffs
- 23:34Q&A
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