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
Material