Unikernels: the next stage of Linux’s dominance

Unikernels have demonstrated enormous advantages over Linux in many important domains, causing some to propose that the days of Linux's dominance may be coming to an end. On the contrary, we believe that unikernels' advantages represent the next natural evolution for Linux, as it can adopt the best ideas from the unikernel approach and, along with its battle-tested codebase and large open source community, continue to dominate. In this paper, we posit that an upstreamable unikernel target is achievable from the Linux kernel, and, through an early Linux unikernel prototype, demonstrate that some simple changes can bring dramatic performance advantages.Accepted manuscrip

Conceptual Design of the Gondola of a Hybrid Airship Including Loading and Unloading Mechanisms

Transport has been a necessity to us since the early times, driving the chase for a better way of moving people, animals and goods from one location to another. The first airship flight happened in 1852, introducing airships to the world and making possible the controlled powered flight. After a series of high-profile accidents involving airships, airplanes were recognized as a safer transportation vehicle and gradually airships were directed for other applications such as advertising, sightseeing, surveillance and research. Nowadays, airships are becoming popular again, promoting their projection to fill a gap in the transport industry, in which they have advantages over other forms of transportation. As the cargo transport demand rises, new transportation options are being considered. Airships are receiving much more attention, as nations are now reconsidering their transportation systems. It can be forecasted, that with time, higher confidence in airship operations and wider scope of their applications, airships could take over of some of the airborne cargo market, due to their obvious competitive advantages. This work’s main goal is to develop an airship’s gondola adjustable to the user’s needs. Either transporting passengers or carrying cargo, airships make possible missions that in some other way would take a longer time to complete and would require much more resources to plan. The project also includes the conceptual design of a cargo container and corresponding loading and unloading mechanisms.O transporte tem sido, desde o início dos tempos, uma necessidade para o Homem, alimentando a procura por melhores formas de mover pessoas, animais e bens de um local para outro. Em 1852, ocorreu o primeiro voo de um dirigível, apresentando-os ao mundo e possibilitando o voo motorizado e controlado. Após uma série de acidentes de destaque, envolvendo dirigíveis, os aviões foram reconhecidos como um veículo de transporte mais seguro e gradualmente os dirigíveis foram direcionados para outras aplicações, tais como publicidade, turismo, vigilância e investigação. Hoje em dia os dirigíveis estão a tornar-se novamente populares, promovendo a sua projeção para preencher uma lacuna no sector de transportes, no qual têm vantagens em relação a outros meios de transporte. Com o aumento da procura pelo transporte de carga, novas opções de transporte estão sendo consideradas e os dirigíveis têm vindo a receber mais atenção, agora que vários países estão reavaliando os seus sistemas de transporte. Prevê-se que, com o tempo, maior confiança na operação de dirigíveis e um âmbito mais amplo para a sua aplicação, os dirigíveis poderão assumir o controlo de uma parte do mercado de transporte de carga aérea, devido às suas óbvias vantagens competitivas. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é desenvolver a gôndola de um dirigível, ajustável às necessidades do operador. Do transporte de passageiros ao transporte de carga, os dirigíveis tornarão possíveis missões que de outra forma levariam muito mais tempo a ser cumpridas e exigiriam muitos mais recursos a serem planeadas. Este projeto inclui também o design conceptual de um contentor de carga e respetivos mecanismos carga e descarga

On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence