[SIGMETRICS'20] Set the Configuration for the Heart of the OS: On the Practicality of Operating System Kernel Debloating [pdf]
We find that less than 20% of an Ubuntu kernel is used for running a HTTP server. Lots of modules(features) are not used and they can be disabled by configurations. However, Linux has so many options and the number of options is still growing... Since it is not practical to spend hours to reconfigure the kernel every time we deploying an application, we need an automatic tool that specialize the bloated kernels.
| Version | # Options |
|---|---|
| 3.0 | 11,328 |
| 4.0 | 14,406 |
| 5.0 | 16,527 |
Cozart generates APPLETS for each applications and BASELETS for each deployment environment. Cozart then can compose one BASELET and one or multiple APPLETS to generate the final configuration.
source constant.sh
make $mnt; make $disk # set-up mnt folder and qemu disk
make setup-qemu # patch the qemu to enable PC tracing
make setup-linux # clone the linux source
make build-db # parse the linux source to extract the relationships between the configuration options and code
make debootstrap # create a rootfs for the VM
make build-base # build the vanilla kernel as the baseline
./trace-kernel.sh [program in the guest] # trace the workload and generate the configuration
If you have any questions, please let me know at hckuo2@illinois.edu. Any feedbacks (good or bad) are also welcomed.