uniprof: A Unikernel Stack Profiler
📜 Abstract
Unikernels are increasingly gaining traction in real-world deployments, especially for NFV and microservices, where their low footprint and high performance are especially beneficial. However, they still suffer from a lack of tools to support developers. uniprof is a stack profiler that supports Xen unikernels on x86 and ARM and does not requires any code changes or instrumentation. Its high speed and low overhead (0.1% at 100 samples/s) makes it usable even in production environments, allowing the collection of realistic and highly credible data.
✨ Summary
- The paper introduced an external, low-overhead stack profiler for Xen-based unikernels. Its implementation and performance results were subsequently used in Unikernels Everywhere: The Case for Elastic CDNs, which employed the profiler to identify system bottlenecks and generate flame graphs for a unikernel-based CDN implementation. (orbi.uliege.be)
- The work also informed later monitoring research. The UNIMON project cited uniprof as an example of deep external monitoring, while motivating an alternative internal-monitoring approach for live virtual network functions because uniprof pauses the virtual machine during stack collection. (coseners.qmul.ac.uk)
- The search found evidence of direct use and comparison in subsequent unikernel research, but no clear evidence of broad industrial adoption beyond its open-source release and inclusion in research-oriented tooling discussions. The author’s project description confirms that uniprof was released as an open-source tool for profiling Xen domains and producing flame-graph visualizations. (flosch.eu)