MorphOS: An Extensible Networked Operating System#

Peter Okelmann; Ilya Meignan-Masson; Masanori Misono; Pramod Bhatotia (Technical University of Munich (TUM))

• Why: The eBPF-as-extension-mechanism idea escapes the Linux kernel: here it's used to make unikernel VNFs hot-updatable without rebuilds, restarts, or state loss. If you care about where eBPF's programming model goes next, this is a data point.
• What: An extensible networked OS for dynamic, stateful network functions. Integrating eBPF enables dynamic, verified code execution to update packet-processing logic live; reported results include drastically reduced reconfiguration time, amortized verification costs, and up to 3× better performance vs. Linux-based VNF deployments, while keeping unikernel lightness (from abstract only).
• How: eBPF plus an out-of-band verification service (so the data path doesn't pay verification cost) and hardware-assisted memory isolation via Memory Protection Keys (MPK) for execution hardening.
• Where applicable: VNF/NFV deployments where update frequency and state continuity matter. Research prototype; the MPK dependence ties it to specific x86 generations, and the eBPF-in-unikernel runtime is not something you can adopt today — but the architectural pattern (verified hot-patching of fast-path logic) generalizes.