ICSA Guest Lecture - 19/05/2022

Talk Title: Compatibility and Safety in Unikernel Operating Systems

Talk Abstract: Unikernels are modular and specialised operating systems running an application in a lightweight and single-purpose virtual machine. They offer many benefits in terms of lightweightness, performance, and security. In this talk, after a general introduction to unikernels and a brief presentation of the main research avenues in the field, I will present two particular contributions. The first is in the domain of compatibility and concerns HermiTux, a unikernel binary-compatible with Linux applications. The second relates to security and introduces FlexOS, an operating system which safety and isolation strategy is seamlessly specialisable at build time, allowing it to achieve a wide range of safety/performance trade-off points in the OS design space.

Bio: Pierre Olivier is a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester. He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Brittany in France. He then joined Virginia Tech in the United States as a Postdoc then as a Research Assistant Professor. His research interests revolve around systems software and include operating systems, virtualisation/hypervisors, systems software security and performance analysis. For more information check out his website (https://sites.google.com/view/pierreolivier)

Useful Links:

HermiTux: https://ssrg-vt.github.io/hermitux/

FlexOS: https://project-flexos.github.io/