Re: [MirageOS-devel] Mirage ARM port

[Andy Ray <andy.ray@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> I would be verry interested in porting mirage. But mirage needs Xen
>> and the Raspberry Pi can't run Xen. So quite a bit of driver glue will
>> be needed. That's why I started with just plain ocaml.
>
> Starting with OCaml is definitely the right thing to do here.  A minor
> correction though: only the Xen backend in Mirage requires Xen :-)
> You should be able to reuse large portions of everything above the
> tuntap layer (for networking), such as the TCP/IP stack.  It would
> help with future compatibility if you use some of the same libraries
> for IO handling, such as Io_page (which is a thin page-aligned wrapper
> above Cstruct+Bigarray).
>
> The reasoning behind the FreeBSD/kernel approach is to give us a nice
> cocoon in which to leverage existing device drivers and slowly move
> our way down the stack, while retaining the ability to benchmark CPU
> and memory usage against the existing (mature and optimized) FreeBSD
> drivers.


I will be starting to port the x86 kernel prototype to arm by the end
of the week.  Then I'm away on holiday for a bit so it may be a while
before I have it working.


> I've just got FreeBSD/rPi userspace up and running and it seems nice
> and stable, which is encouraging (aside from the lack of binary packages,
> so I'm leaving it compiling OCaml and its dependencies for the next
> day or so).


I've had my rPi running continuously for about a week now without
crashing and it seems very stable.

If you stick to the build instructions for the kernel here

http://andrewray.github.io/mirage-fpga/

you can use my binary packages.  It should get you to a working opam +
ocaml installation (with git and vim) in a couple of hours.

Compiling mirage-www through opam took 2-3 hours.

I am close to a few patches for the ocaml ports package (which the
maintainer has agreed to help push upstream) so there should even be a
binary package for ocaml fairly soon.


>> I'm going to hold a talk about ocaml barebone on the RPi end of next
>> week so I have till then finish and release something. I will post the
>> url when I do.
>
> Sounds great, I really look forward to this!
>


Me too!

-Andy

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