Periodic Reporting for period 2 - UNICORE (A Common Code Base and Toolkit for Deployment of Applications to Secure and Reliable Virtual Execution Environments)
Reporting period: 2020-01-01 to 2022-03-31
Unicore enables EU players to lead the next generation of cloud computing services and technology. Such tools also allow for the creation of lean, efficient operating systems that are be perfectly suitable for resource-constrained devices settings such as IoT. Through its industry-led consortium and its top-notch academic partners, Unicore ensures exploitation of its technical results through the implementation and operational deployment of multiple use cases. For society at large, running significantly more efficient software especially in large cloud deployments significantly reduces power consumption, and with that, reduces emissions.
The main goals of Unicore are to (1) provide a common code base and tools for code reusability, (2) to develop tools for verification and validation of the generated software, (3) to transparently handle cross-platform dependencies and by (4) to accelerate the full software lifecycle by fully automating several of its stages.
- Tools for automated dependency analysis, automated configuration and automated building are ready at https://github.com/unikraft/tools
- Initial work on securing and hardening unikernels, as well as leveraging unikernel properties for security purposes
- Definition of basic library APIs (e.g. block, network, console) is finished (see https://github.com/unikraft/unikraft)
- Extremely secure and efficient, application-specific unikernels with minimal Trusted Compute Base.
- Transparent support for multiple platform types: VMs, containers and bare metal.