DevConf.CZ 2020

VirtIO proposes a common front end for device emulation in the context of virtual environments. In particular, Virtio-fs and Virtio-vsocket devices are very interesting for unikernels because they allow deploying instances with a simplified device model thus reducing the attack surface. Also, the use of these devices makes the kernel simpler. For example, when using the virtio-vsocket device, the TCP/IP Stack and the network driver are not needed anymore. During this session, we present the work done to support virtio-fs and virtio-vsocket in the context of Toro unikernel. We propose to show the benefits of using these devices not only in terms of performance against other virtio devices like virtio-net or virtio-blk but also in terms of the number of lines of code that you can throw away. We illustrate the approach by showing the work needed to port a web-server appliance that uses classical Berkeley sockets.