# Jitsu: Just-In-Time Summoning of Unikernels

*2015-05-01 — paper*

Authors: Anil Madhavapeddy, Thomas Leonard, Magnus Skjegstad, Thomas Gazagnaire, David Sheets, Dave Scott, Richard Mortier, Amir Chaudhry, Balraj Singh, Jon Ludlam, Jon Crowcroft, Ian Leslie


Network latency is a problem for all cloud services. It can be mitigated by
moving computation out of remote datacenters by rapidly instantiating local
services near the user. This requires an embedded cloud platform on which to
deploy multiple applications securely and quickly. We present Jitsu, a new Xen
toolstack that satisfies the demands of secure multi-tenant isolation on
resource-constrained embedded ARM devices. It does this by using unikernels:
lightweight, compact, single address space, memory-safe virtual machines (VMs)
written in a high-level language. Using fast shared memory channels, Jitsu
provides a directory service that launches unikernels in response to network
traffic and masks boot latency. Our evaluation shows Jitsu to be a
power-efficient and responsive platform for hosting cloud services in the edge
network while preserving the strong isolation guarantees of a type-1
hypervisor.


Classification: full
Venue: 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 15)
URL: https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi15/technical-sessions/presentation/madhavapeddy
Projects: Unikernels

## Related

- [The Internet needs an antibotty immune system, stat](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/internet-immune-system) (note, 2026-04-08)
- [Jitsu: Just-In-Time Summoning of Unikernels](https://anil.recoil.org/videos/ad4658f5-ca4f-42f3-b61a-58f13dcdeb1a) (video, 2015-05-04)
- [Jitsu: Just-In-Time Summoning of Unikernels](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2015-nsdi-jitsu-1) (note, 2015-05-01)
- [Just-in-Time Summoning of Unikernels at New directions in OS](https://anil.recoil.org/videos/46968fa0-e5bd-4df8-98e1-3cf88d9b31e5) (video, 2014-11-25)
- [Unikernels](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/unikernels) (project, 2010-01-01)
- [Xen Hypervisor](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/xen) (project, 2002-01-01)

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Canonical: https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-nsdi-jitsu
Type: paper
Tags: mirageos, dns, embedded, systems, security, conference, unikernels