Re: Skywriting + mirage

[Sebastian Probst Eide <sebastian.probst.eide@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mort:
>> In the "Turning down the LAMP" paper, section 5, it is mentioned that mirage 
>> is a good match as an execution platform for skywriting (and by extension 
>> CIEL). Has there already been done any work in that area?
> not that i'm aware of, though the frp stuff starting now/soon is arguably 
> part of that.  anil will know better.
> (why?)
I find both Mirage and CIEL/Skywriting very interesting, and would like to do 
some work in those areas.


Anil:
>> Dear miragers,
>> 
>> In the "Turning down the LAMP" paper, section 5, it is mentioned that mirage 
>> is a good match as an execution platform for skywriting (and by extension 
>> CIEL). Has there already been done any work in that area?
> 
> Hey Seb,
> 
> Yes, there's been ongoing work in that area since the paper. The problem with 
> specialising CIEL tasks (or indeed, most data-intensive processing) is that 
> the interconnects become increasingly inefficient as the worker kernels 
> become more fine-grained.
> 
> Malte did some initial work on this to demonstrate the problem:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ms705/paper-sfma.pdf
> 
> A bunch of us have been developing a more efficient 'elastic' I/O 
> interconnect for connecting VMs:
> http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2012-resolve-fable.pdf
> http://anil.recoil.org/papers/drafts/2012-usenix-ipc-draft1.pdf (short paper 
> version draft)
> http://anil.recoil.org/talks/fosdem-io-2012.pdf
Thanks for all the references! I'll have a read.

> Meanwhile, David Scott has been rewriting the Xen toolstack to better support 
> low-latency microVMs (aka 'stub domains').
> http://github.com/djs55/xen-api (cooper branch, unreleased code, Dave's on 
> this list).
Cool! On my watch list.

> We're integrating this into Mirage (with multi-language support) at the 
> moment. I'll have an update on that in a week or two, as it relates to the 
> upcoming 1.0 release plan for Mirage.
What exactly are you integrating into mirage? The work on fable / ipc?

Thanks.

~ Seb