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

E-WarP: a system-wide framework for memory bandwidth profiling and management

The proliferation of multi-core, accelerator-enabled embedded systems has introduced new opportunities to consolidate real-time systems of increasing complexity. But the road to build confidence on the temporal behavior of co-running applications has presented formidable challenges. Most prominently, the main memory subsystem represents a performance bottleneck for both CPUs and accelerators. And industry-viable frameworks for full-system main memory management and performance analysis are past due. In this paper, we propose our Envelope-aWare Predictive model, or E-WarP for short. E-WarP is a methodology and technological framework to: (1) analyze the memory demand of applications following a profile-driven approach; (2) make realistic predictions on the temporal behavior of workload deployed on CPUs and accelerators; and (3) perform saturation-aware system consolidation. This work aims at providing the technological foundations as well as the theoretical grassroots for truly workload-aware analysis of real-time systems. We provide a full implementation of our techniques on a commercial platform (NXP S32V234) and make two key observations. First, we achieve, on average, a 6% overprediction on the runtime of bandwidth-regulated applications. Second, we experimentally validate that the calculated bounds hold if the main memory subsystem operates below saturation.https://cs-people.bu.edu/rmancuso/files/papers/EWarP_RTSS20_final.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Comparative evaluation of egg based solid media for primary isolation of Paratuberculosis bacilli

81-87Paratuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) is a prevalent infection and is highly expensive to livestock industry. Paratuberculosis also has zoonotic concerns with Crohn’s disease. Isolation of MAP from infected individuals/samples is the most vital for downstream studies. However, MAP is extremely fastidious organism and primary isolation is extremely difficult. Mycobacterial growth indicator tube (MGIT) medium is most recommended for primary isolation, but this medium is highly expensive and requires sophisticated instrument and is unaffordable for developing and underdeveloped world. Present study aimed to investigate the comparative performance of three different egg based solid media (MB7H10, LJ and HEYM) for the primary isolation of MAP from clinically suspected animals. Animals having signs of paratuberculosis were sampled either from farms in Jaipur District of Western India or slaughterhouse. Slaughtered animals were sampled having swollen & enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes (MLN) with thickened/ corrugated intestine near ileo-cecal junction (ICJ). Fecal samples were collected from suspected cattle, buffalo, goat and sheep. MB7H10 medium showed maximum recovery of MAP isolates from clinical samples. Most of the isolates grew on MB7H10 (41.9 %) followed by LJ (22.3%) and HEYM (6.25 %). In case single medium is to be used MB7H10 is the first choice and combination of MB7H10+LJ is better. In conclusion, combination of MB7H10+LJ is the best choice for solid media for the isolation of the MAP in laboratories

Comparative evaluation of egg based solid media for primary isolation of Paratuberculosis bacilli

Paratuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) is a prevalent infection and is highly expensive to livestock industry. Paratuberculosis also has zoonotic concerns with Crohn’s disease. Isolation of MAP from infected individuals/samples is the most vital for downstream studies. However, MAP is extremely fastidious organism and primary isolation is extremely difficult. Mycobacterial growth indicator tube (MGIT) medium is most recommended for primary isolation, but this medium is highly expensive and requires sophisticated instrument and is unaffordable for developing and underdeveloped world. Present study aimed to investigate the comparative performance of three different egg based solid media (MB7H10, LJ and HEYM) for the primary isolation of MAP from clinically suspected animals. Animals having signs of paratuberculosis were sampled either from farms in Jaipur District of Western India or slaughterhouse. Slaughtered animals were sampled having swollen & enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes (MLN) with thickened/ corrugated intestine near ileo-cecal junction (ICJ). Fecal samples were collected from suspected cattle, buffalo, goat and sheep. MB7H10 medium showed maximum recovery of MAP isolates from clinical samples. Most of the isolates grew on MB7H10 (41.9 %) followed by LJ (22.3%) and HEYM (6.25 %). In case single medium is to be used MB7H10 is the first choice and combination of MB7H10+LJ is better. In conclusion, combination of MB7H10+LJ is the best choice for solid media for the isolation of the MAP in laboratories

Unikernel Linux (UKL)

This paper presents Unikernel Linux (UKL), a path toward integrating unikernel optimization techniques in Linux, a general purpose operating system. UKL adds a configuration option to Linux allowing for a single, optimized process to link with the kernel directly, and run at supervisor privilege. This UKL process does not require application source code modification, only a re-link with our, slightly modified, Linux kernel and glibc. Unmodified applications show modest performance gains out of the box, and developers can further optimize applications for more significant gains (e.g. 26% throughput improvement for Redis). UKL retains support for co-running multiple user level processes capable of communicating with the UKL process using standard IPC. UKL preserves Linux's battle-tested codebase, community, and ecosystem of tools, applications, and hardware support. UKL runs both on bare-metal and virtual servers and supports multi-core execution. The changes to the Linux kernel are modest (1250 LOC).Comment: Added more results in the evaluation section. Improved overall writing and added diagrams to explain the architectur