Using the Minimal Kernel

Xen provides an operating system kernel called MiniOS which has been used for building a number of Unikernel projects including Stardust but these projects have become sophisticated as more features have been introduced over time. In order to assist the teaching activities at the University of St Andrews, we provide a smaller kernel that is used as a reference implementation for developing simple applications that support Xen.

https://github.com/StardustOS/minimal

Instructions

Simply run Make in order to build the virtual machine image of the minimal kernel minimal.gz. Please note that you need the native header files of the Xen hypervisor present in your build environment. Please refer to this setup guide to learn more about setting up this environment.

In order to execute the virtual machine run sudo xl create -c minimal.conf where minimal.conf is the configuration file that specifies the location of the virtual machine image and the virtual memory specification.

References

Chisnall D. The definitive guide to the xen hypervisor. Pearson Education; 2008.