Stardust: A Unikernel OS for Cloud Applications

Operating Systems

Discover Stardust, a unikernel OS designed for secure cloud applications. Featuring a minimal codebase, static linking, multi-core support, and POSIX compatibility, it powers research at St Andrews.

What is Stardust?

Stardust is a unikernel operating system specifically engineered to execute cloud applications within a secure, single-address space environment. It intelligently delegates the management of physical resources to an underlying hypervisor, which is considered a trusted platform.

Designed for maintainability, Stardust boasts a minimal codebase. It utilizes static linking to consolidate a lean kernel with a singular application, along with all necessary libraries and the programming language runtime required for execution. This static linking approach ensures that each executable binary of Stardust is packaged as an immutable, single-purpose virtual machine image.

Key features of Stardust include support for multiple CPU cores, preemptive threads, and fundamental block and networking drivers. It also provides a comprehensive collection of standard POSIX-compatible libraries. Stardust is actively used to support teaching and research initiatives at the University of St Andrews.

Related Projects

  • Stardust: The core unikernel implementation written in C.
  • Stardust-oxide: A modern re-implementation of the unikernel, developed in Rust.
  • Duster: A lightweight debugger designed for para-virtualized C-based unikernels running on the Xen hypervisor.

Presentations and Publications

Talks

  • Jaradat, W., Dearle A., and Lewis, J. "Unikernel Support for Lambda Functions." Presented at the Fifth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2020.
  • Ahmad, K., Dearle A., Lewis, J., and Jaradat, W. "Debugging Unikernel Operating Systems." (Slides available) Presented at the Fifth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2020.
  • Jaradat, W. "On Engineering Unikernels." Presented at the Systems Seminars Series, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, 2018.
  • Jaradat, W., Dearle, A., and Lewis, J. "Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services." Presented at the Third Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2018.
  • Jaradat, W. "Towards Unikernel Support for Distributed Microservices." Presented at the Adobe Tech Summit, San Francisco, United States of America, 2019.
  • Jaradat, W., Dearle, A., and Lewis, J. "The Case for Unikernels." Presented as a Lightning Talk at the Fourth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2019.

Materials

  • Jaradat, W., Dearle, A., and Lewis, J. "Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services." In the Third Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2018.
  • McKeogh, F. "Stardust Oxide." Dissertation, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom.