Unikraft Development

First off, welcome to the project and thanks so much for your interest! Most of the information you'll need about how to develop for Unikraft you'll find in the main repo's docs directory [1]. We'll use this space mainly to give information about what the core team is currently working on, and to give suggestions about what we would like to have in Unikraft but haven't had the time to work on yet in case you're looking for ideas. We will also post information about past and upcoming releases.

Release Plan

The current idea is to release under 0.x versions (codename: Titan) until we reach a stable low-level platform and architecture API. Although libraries might be added, the focus is on the low-level API. During the 0.x release everyone should expect reorganizations and changes of these interfaces. During this cycle, a major goal is also to add more platforms and architectures (e.g., ARM64, VMware) - this helps us defining the low-level APIs properly.

Starting from version 1.0 (codename: Iapetus) we expect an almost stabilized platform and architecture API. No major changes should be expected on existing interfaces, new APIs might still be added. The focus of this release series will be on adding functionality and variety with libraries.

The codenames are settled on Saturn moons ordered by discovery date [2]. This means, 1.0 will be called Iapetus, 2.0 Rhea, and so on.

Core Team - Current Work Items

1. support for a xen console
2. support for xenbus, events, paravirtualized drivers (network initially)
3. pre-emptive scheduler
4. libpython (i.e., turning Python/cpython into a Unikraft library)

Suggestions for Contributions

If you're thinking of working on any of these please drop us a line.

1. bare metal platform target (x86_64 or ARM32 initially)
2. vfs/filesystem support#
3. adding PCI functionality to libkvm (so we can support drivers)
4. adding multi-application support (i.e., so we can build an image that runs more than one application)
5. adding support for a high perf I/O framework (DPDK, netmap)
6. Adding profiling/tracing capability to Unikraft
7. SSH + a minimalistic shell
8. Other languages (e.g., Ruby, node.js)
9. platform support for containers
10. using initramdisk to include filesystem into image
11. Unit testing support, including tool to test diff combos of libs and report on compile/link errors.
12. Porting Toybox to Unikraft