ZeroOS: A Universal Modular Library OS for zkVMs

TL;DR

ZeroOS is a modular, open-source library OS designed for zkVMs, enabling minimal, compatible, and maintainable unikernels that simplify verifiable application development and ecosystem unification.

Contribution

It introduces ZeroOS, a flexible libOS that reduces complexity and maintenance by allowing selective Linux ABI inclusion for zkVM-based unikernels.

Findings

ZeroOS enables minimal and compatible unikernels for zkVMs.

It reduces maintenance and development effort for zkVM ecosystems.

ZeroOS is open-source and easily integrable across zkVM platforms.

Abstract

zkVMs promise general-purpose verifiable computation through ISA-level compatibility with modern programs and toolchains. However, compatibility extends further than just the ISA; modern programs often cannot run or even compile without an operating system and libc. zkVMs attempt to address this by maintaining forks of language-specific runtimes and statically linking them into applications to create self-contained unikernels, but this ad-hoc approach leads to version hell and burdens verifiable applications (vApps) with an unnecessarily large trusted computing base. We solve this problem with ZeroOS, a modular library operating system (libOS) for vApp unikernels; vApp developers can use off-the-shelf toolchains to compile and link only the exact subset of the Linux ABI their vApp needs. Any zkVM team can easily leverage the ZeroOS ecosystem by writing a ZeroOS bootloader for their platform, resulting in a reduced maintainence burden and unifying the entire zkVM ecosystem with consolidated development and audit resources. ZeroOS is free and open-sourced at https://github.com/LayerZero-Labs/ZeroOS.