SURE: Secure Unikernels Make Serverless Computing Rapid and Efficient

Building and running

All code blocks suppose to be executed from a common working directory.

Building SURE apps

Install pre-requirements:

sudo apt install -y python3-pip meson libglib2.0-dev libssl-dev libnuma-dev libncurses-dev flex bison libibverbs-dev

pip3 install pyelftools

Clone SURE repo:

git clone https://github.com/FedeParola/sure.git
cd sure
git submodule update --init --recursive

Patch, build and install QEMU:

git clone https://github.com/qemu/qemu.git
cd qemu
git checkout v8.2.0
git apply ../sure/ivshmem_patch.diff
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --target-list=x86_64-softmmu
make -j
sudo make install

Build and install Z-stack:

git clone https://github.com/FedeParola/f-stack.git

cd f-stack/dpdk
meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

cd ../lib
make -j
sudo make install

Bind a network interface to DPDK driver (not needed for Mellanox NICs):

sudo modprobe uio
sudo insmod f-stack/dpdk/build/kernel/linux/igb_uio/igb_uio.ko
sudo ip link set <ifname> down
sudo dpdk-devbind.py -b igb_uio <ifname>

Build Unimsg manager and gateway:

git clone https://github.com/FedeParola/unimsg.git
cd unimsg/manager/
make
cd ../gateway
make

Build the SURE application (e.g., rr-latency):

cd sure/apps/rr-latency/sure
make menuconfig
# Configure the application
make -j

Running SURE apps

Allocate 2M hugepages:

echo 1024 | sudo tee /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages
sudo umount /dev/hugepages
sudo mount -t hugetlbfs -o pagesize=2M none /dev/hugepages

Run the manager:

cd unimsg/manager
sudo ./unimsg_manager

Run the gateway:

cd unimsg/gateway
sudo ./unimsg_gateway

Run the SURE VM (e.g., rr-latency app). <id> is an incremental id of the VM starting from 1. The address of the VM will be computed as 10.0.0.<id>.

cd sure/apps/rr-latency/sure
sudo ./run.sh <id> <args>

Tuning the nodes

To prevent CPU C-states and P-states form affecting measurements, the following tuning can be applied. Following instructions were tested on a CloudLab sm110p node, but should apply to all recent Intel CPUs.

Disable P-states (frequency scaling)

Edit /etc/default/grub and append intel_pstate=passive to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX option, then apply and reboot the machine:

sudo update-grub2
sudo reboot

Disable turbo-boost:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

Set all cores to max frequency:

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Disable C-states (idle states)

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpuidle/state*/disable