My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container
By Filipe Manco, Costin Lupu, F. Schmidt, Jose Mendes, Simon Kuenzer, S. Sati, Kenichi Yasukata, Costin Raiciu, Felipe Huici. Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2017
329 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Containers are in great demand because they are lightweight when compared to virtual machines. On the downside, containers offer weaker isolation than VMs, to the point where people run containers in virtual machines to achieve proper isolation. In this paper, we examine whether there is indeed a strict tradeoff between isolation (VMs) and efficiency (containers). We find that VMs can be as nimble as containers, as long as they are small and the toolstack is fast enough. We achieve lightweight VMs by using unikernels for specialized applications and with Tinyx, a tool that enables creating tailor-made, trimmed-down Linux virtual machines. By themselves, lightweight virtual machines are not enough to ensure good performance since the virtualization control plane (the toolstack) becomes the performance bottleneck. We present LightVM, a new virtualization solution based on Xen that is optimized to offer fast boot-times regardless of the number of active VMs. LightVM features a complete redesign of Xen's control plane, transforming its centralized operation to a distributed one where interactions with the hypervisor are reduced to a minimum. LightVM can boot a VM in 2.3ms, comparable to fork/exec on Linux (1ms), and two orders of magnitude faster than Docker. LightVM can pack thousands of LightVM guests on modest hardware with memory and CPU usage comparable to that of processes.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d499dd08a0e2270c07dfda8cf28aafc609deef1
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Computer Networks and Communications
- Raluca Ada Popa
- Paarijaat Aditya
- Simon Shillaker
- Peter R. Pietzuch
- Ruichuan Chen
- Chia-che Tsai
- Haibo Chen
- Ion Stoica
In Information Systems
- Raluca Ada Popa
- Simon Shillaker
- Peter R. Pietzuch
- Chia-che Tsai
- Haibo Chen
- Ion Stoica
- Binyu Zang
- Mosharaf Chowdhury
Citations in the corpus
- SAND: Towards High-Performance Serverless Computing (2018, background): “A bare-bones unikernel-based VM (e.g., LightVM [40]) can launch faster than a container to execute a function; however, its image size depends on the libraries loaded by each function, and thus, may impact startup latency.”
- Faasm: Lightweight Isolation for Efficient Stateful Serverless Computing (2020, background): “SOCK [52] improves the container boot process to achieve cold starts in the low hundreds of milliseconds; similar results can be achieved with optimised VMs and unikernels [43,45].”
- Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing (2019, background): “One approach to reduce (2) is leveraging unikernels [60].”
- Catalyzer: Sub-millisecond Startup for Serverless Computing with Initialization-less Booting (2020, methodology): “The ephemeral execution sandboxes are typically containers [1], virtual machines [20, 44] or recently proposed lightweight virtualization designs [6, 8, 19, 35, 37, 41, 45].”