About

Charalampos (Babis) Mainas is a Systems Researcher and OS & Hypervisor Engineer with a PhD candidate status at the National Technical University of Athens (HSCNL, NTUA). He focuses on low-level systems programming, including Linux kernel development, hypervisors (KVM, Xen), and unikernel runtime ecosystems.

He leads the design and development of the cloud-native container runtime urunc and the building and packaging tool bunny, enabling seamless build-and-run workflows for unikernels and single-application kernels. His interests span kernel mechanisms, OS-adjacent tooling, and integration of cutting-edge systems technologies, contributing deep expertise in performance-sensitive and isolation-oriented environments.

Research Interests

Babis is deeply interested in low-level aspects of computing systems, such as kernels, hypervisors, and software that tightly interacts with them. He has significant hands-on experience with the Linux kernel and the two most widely used hypervisors – KVM and Xen.

A significant portion of his work has been dedicated to unikernels, including porting applications, libraries, and language runtimes with an emphasis on enhancing their compatibility with existing technologies. Through his work on bunny and urunc, he enables users to simply docker build and docker run unikernels.

Personal Website

For more detailed and up-to-date information, visit: https://cmainas.gitlab.io/