Unikernels and Memory Deduplication

Unikernels are lightweight OS dedicated to single application support. As such, unikernels are small (compared with traditional OSes) and show impressive performance measurements such as very fast boot time. Nevertheless, these properties come at a cost: we show that, while containing identical components, different unikernels show few opportunities for VM page sharing, the core mechanism for memory deduplication in cloud settings. This, in turn, tends to limit the number of unikernels that can be launched on a same host hypervisor. We analyse the reasons between this state of affair and propose solutions to this problemUNICOR