The Rust-based Hermit operating system project allows you to compile your application against our modular library operating system to create a unikernel image, which can run in a VM.

This unikernel image is much more lightweight than traditional VM images, which contain a full-blown Linux Distribution. We are talking Megabytes in size instead of Gigabytes. That's because the unikernel image can be specialized to the application that runs and the environment that the image runs in. Having only one application per VM also allows Hermit to be a single address space operating system. That means we don't have to do any context switches between user space and kernel spaces and every system call becomes a function call into the library operating system.

In this talk, we will present the highlights of last year's developments in Hermit. These are the topics we will cover:

• Interesting Internals
  • Soundness Foundations (hermit-sync)
  • async-Driven In-Kernel Network Stack Architecture
• New Platform Support
  • Firecracker
  • UEFI
• Enhanced Architecture Support
  • AArch64 (ARM64)
  • 64-bit RISC-V
• Accessible Application Development Workflow
  • stable Rust Toolchain Release Channel Support
  • Windows Host Support
• Advanced Applications
  • GPU Virtualization with Cricket
  • Profiling through Instrumentation with rftrace