Building a Specialized Wasm Operating System with Unikraft, Sharan Santhanam
Original event: https://www.meetup.com/wasmsf/events/...
IoT and embedded devices are ubiquitous, and Linux is arguably the dominant operating system used to drive them thanks to its a large range of supported applications, programming languages, and a friendly development and deployment environment, among others. However, it is well known that Linux is resource hungry, which is a problem for devices where such resources are at a premium. Worse, because it is monolithic, stripping unnecessary parts off is non-trivial, and the resulting Trusted Compute Base unnecessarily large, potentially leading to a great number of vulnerabilities in deployed systems.
In this talk we introduce a Wasm-specialized operating system built with Unikraft, a library OS build tools and common code base that significantly simplifies the process of generating OS and software stacks tailored to the needs of a particular application (or in this case the Intel WebAssembly Micro Runtime). We demonstrate the system on a standard Raspberry Pi 3 B+, where a simple hello world Wasm program takes just 13 milliseconds to boot and consumes only 53KB of memory, significantly better than a standard Raspbian Lite installation.