Existing virtualization solutions such as Xen, QEMU and usermode operating systems virtualize the entire OS. While this is useful in a machine room type of use case, it is unnecessarily heavyweight when the interest is in virtualizing only one kernel driver or one kernel service. This talk introduces the anykernel architecture and rump kernels, which allow to safely virtualize individual drivers and subsystems from a monolithic kernel. Rump kernels can be used in a variety of different configurations, such as an application library, a microkernel style server, or as a server over the Internet. We will go over a number of real world use cases and present results which show that in their application domain rump kernels are faster, smaller and more agile than full OS virtualization technologies.
The implementation is available in production quality code as part of NetBSD. A key point of the project is the use of existing drivers from a real OS, i.e. real-world hardened code.
Speakers: Antti Kantee