Prof. Dr. Frank Bellosa
Dr. Marc Rittinghaus

Abstract
Unikernels promise to enable building specialized combinations of an application and a kernel. Because they are usually built with a specific use-case, they can remove large parts which would be integral part of a classical operating system. While they only support running a single application, they still have to support a wide variety of potential applications to remain useful. There has been a focus in recent years on improving the specialization aspect by allowing the developer to configure included functionality within the unikernel. However, the applications ported to run as part of a unikernel often still rely on configuration text files parsed
during startup at runtime.
Because this configuration is not known to compiler, optimizations such as constant propagation or dead code elimination cannot specialize the application itself for the desired use case. We propose a mechanism to determine the effective configuration at runtime and inject the configuration values at compile-time as
constants. This allows the compiler to take the actual values into consideration during optimization.

BibTex:

@masterthesis{schlumpp22specialized unikernels,
  author = {Marco Schlumpp},
  title = {Aggressive Constant Propagation For Specialized Unikernels},
  type = {Master Thesis},
  year = 2022,
  month = aug # "01",
  school = {Operating Systems Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany}
  }