Title
Exploring Rust for Unikernel Development
Abstract
System-level development has been dominated by programming languages like C/C++ for decades. These languages are inherently unsafe, error-prone, and a major reason for vulnerabilities. High-level programming languages with a secure memory model and strong type system are able to improve the quality of the system software. In this paper, we explore the programming language Rust for kernel development and present RustyHermit, which is a unikernel completely written in Rust without any C/C++. We show that the support for RustyHermit can be transparently integratable in the Rust toolchain and common Rust applications are build-able on top of RustyHermit. Previously, we developed the C-based unikernel HermitCore with a similar design to RustyHermit and we are able to compare both kernels. We show that the performance of both kernels is similar and only ~3.27 % of RustyHermit relies on unsafe code, that cannot be checked by the compiler in detail.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3365137.3365395
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems
Field
DocType
ISBN
Unikernel,Software engineering,Computer science,Rust,Distributed computing
Conference
978-1-4503-7017-2
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stefan Lankes115226.39
Jens Breitbart2175.22
Simon Pickartz3236.06