Kite: Lightweight Critical Service Domains

Kite implements rumprun-based network and storage driver domains for Xen. The corresponding EuroSys 2022 paper is available at this link.

See the paper's Appendix for artifact description and general installation instructions. Similar instructions are available in Artifact/README.pdf. See also Artifact/README_benchmark.pdf for the instructions to set up the required benchmark environment in the Ubuntu guest VM and client machine to evaluate Xen driver domains, such as Ubuntu and Kite.

LICENSE contains the licensing terms.

Setup (physical machine)

Xen:

First, install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on an x86-64 machine. Please select "Use LVM with the new Ubuntu installation". Then, install the Xen hypervisor and reboot the machine; GRUB should automatically boot Xen and launch Dom0:

# apt install xen-hypervisor-amd64

PCI passthrough:

Find BDF numbers of the available PCI devices (NIC, NVMe) using the lspci command. Then, add the corresponding device to the PCI assignable list, where xx:xx.x represents the BDF number:

# modprobe xen-pciback
# xl pci-assignable-add xx:xx.x

Kite's build environment:

First, install some pre-requisite libraries.

# apt install build-essential git
# apt install libz-dev libxen-dev

Kite's source is already included into this package but you can also retrieve the latest version by running:

$ git clone https://github.com/ssrg-vt/kite
$ cd kite
$ git submodule update --init --recursive --remote

To build Kite, run:

$ CC=`echo $PWD`/gcc8fix.sh ./build-rr.sh -j16 hw
$ cd bridge
$ ./ifconf.sh && ./run.sh
$ cd ../vbdconf
$ ./run.sh

Running Kite driver domains

Network domain:

First, update Artifact/config/network/ubunt_dd.cfg with the BDF number of the network device:

pci=['xx:xx.x,permissive=1']

Next, launch the Kite network domain using the following command.

# xl create -c Artifact/config/network/kite_dd.cfg

Storage domain:

First, update Artifact/config/storage/ubunt_dd.cfg with the BDF number of the storage device:

pci=['xx:xx.x,permissive=1']

Next, launch the Kite storage domain using the following command.

# xl create -c Artifact/config/network/kite_dd.cfg

Some important directories

kite/
 \_ Artifact                    - Evaluation instruction and files
 \_ bridge/                     - Network domain application 
 \_ platform/
|   \_ hw/
|     \_ librumpxen_blkback/    - Storage driver backend
|     \_ librumpxen_netback/    - Network driver backend
\_ vbdconf/                     - Storage domain application

Reference

@inproceedings{10.1145/3492321.3519586,
author = {Mehrab, A K M Fazla and Nikolaev, Ruslan and Ravindran, Binoy},
title = {Kite: Lightweight Critical Service Domains},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450391627},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3492321.3519586},
doi = {10.1145/3492321.3519586},
pages = {384–401},
numpages = {18},
keywords = {hypervisor, unikernel, Xen, virtual machine},
location = {Rennes, France},
series = {EuroSys '22}
}