bypass4netns VS unikraft

Socket activation should be the fastest alternative as then there is no need to process and interpret the network traffic that is sent over the socket. Both slirp4netns and netavark process the traffic. If I understand correctly the network driver bypass4netns could have similar performance as socket activation. The current bypass4netns implementation has some security problems but it seems that could be fixed.

(That could a be cool feature)

Also interesting would be to fix the security considerations of using bypass4netns:

"However, it is probably possible to connect to host loopback IPs by exploiting TOCTOU of struct sockaddr * pointers."

There seems to be an implementation idea for how the problem could be fixed:

https://github.com/rootless-containers/bypass4netns/issues/2...

The filesystem performance degradation was resolved in kernel 5.11 which added support for rootless overlayfs.

The network performance is caused by slirp (usermode TCP/IP) but it is being resolved too : https://github.com/rootless-containers/bypass4netns

You should also probably check out Unikraft (https://unikraft.org) , supports many languages/apps, x86/ARM64 and QEMU/Firecracker. Is also able to run an ELF built under Linux as a unikernel (see https://unikraft.org/guides/bincompat). Discord is at https://unikraft.org/discord .

>"For performance-oriented UDP-based apps, much of the OS networking stack is useless:

the app could simply use the driver API, much like DPDK-style applications already do.

There is currently no way to easily remove just the network stack but not the entire network sub-system from standard OSes."

This page is a great read for any current or future OS developer...

Related:

"Unikraft is a fast, secure and open-source Unikernel Development Kit":

https://unikraft.org/

"Unikraft is an automated system for building specialized OSes known as unikernels."

https://github.com/unikraft/unikraft

unikernel is not the same microkernel.

I've found these after some quick googling:

https://unikraft.org/

Check out https://github.com/unikraft/unikraft

Wow, just now seeing this topic. I work for a cloud company hosted in AWS. We started out, Netflix/Spotify style microservices. We were all on ec2 images generate by packer (and later with AWS Image Factory). When Docker hit, we kicked the tires but never did anything with it beyond using it for running unit tests, and later, infrastructure tests. 5 years ago, during a hackathon, our little group began experimenting with Unikernels, or library operating systems. Interestingly enough, these Unikernels were all stripped down BSD kernels. OSv is FreeBSD based, and Rumprun is NetBSD based. Services running in EC2 on Unikernels would spin up and start sending and receiving traffic before the AWS EC2 healthchecks completed. They are blazing fast! Only problem in 2017, was the tooling. It would have taken too much effort to use Unikernals with our infrastructure. As soon as they start making Unikernels that can run Java bytecode like native code, the fate of containerization will be sealed, IMO. We could get basic JVM webservers running on OSv, but not Cassandra, not Kafka, not yet. OSv now runs on Firecracker, but I have not tried it out, yet. Some links if you are interested: OSv: https://osv.io Rumprun: https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun We used this tooling during the Hackathon, but doesn't look like it has been touched in 3 years: https://github.com/solo-io/unik Unikraft Unikernel Dev kit: https://unikraft.org/ And don't forget Firecracker running in Kubernetes https://www.weave.works/oss/firekube/ And of course, being a FreeBSD subreddit, let's not forget FreeBSD on Firecracker https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2022-10-18-FreeBSD-Firecracker.html

and Unikraft