What is Stardust?

Stardust is a unikernel operating system designed to run Cloud applications in a protected, single-address space environment. It delegates the management of physical resources to an underlying hypervisor which is treated as a trusted platform. Stardust has a small code base that can be maintained easily, and relies on static linking to combine a minimal kernel with a single application, along with the libraries and associated programming language run-time required for the execution of the application. Due to static linking, an executable binary of Stardust is packaged within an immutable single-purpose virtual machine image. Stardust supports multiple cores, preemptive threads, and basic block and networking drivers, and provides a collection of standard POSIX-compatible libraries.

Stardust is being used in supporting the teaching and research activities at the University of St Andrews.

Projects

• Stardust provides the unikernel implementation in C.
• Stardust-oxide is a re-implementation of the unikernel in Rust.
• Duster provides a small debugger for para-virtualised Unikernels written in C that run on the Xen hypervisor.

Talks

• Jaradat, W., Dearle A. and Lewis, J. Unikernel Support for Lambda Functions. In the Fifth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2020. Accepted Talk
• Ahmad, K., Dearle A., Lewis, J. and Jaradat, W. Debugging Unikernel Operating Systems (Slides). In the Fifth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2020. Accepted Talk
• Jaradat, W. On Engineering Unikernels, Systems Seminars Series, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, 2018. Talk
• Jaradat, W., Dearle, A. and Lewis, J. Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services. In the Third Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2018. Talk
• Jaradat, W. Towards Unikernel Support for Distributed Microservices. Adobe Tech Summit, San Francisco, United States of America, 2019. Talk
• Jaradat, W., Dearle, A. and Lewis, J. The Case for Unikernels. In the Fourth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2019. Lightning Talk

Material

• Jaradat, W., Dearle, A. and Lewis, J. Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services. In the Third Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2018.
• McKeogh, F., Stardust Oxide, Dissertation, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom.