Re: [MirageOS-devel] Hosting a VM on Mirage

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 January 2015 at 14:03, Joerg Beekmann, DeepCove Labs
<joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi
>
>
>
> I just discovered Mirage and am quite fascinated by it. Is anyone aware of
> attempts to use Mirage OS as a host for a virtual machine supporting another
> language? In my case I am wondering if Mirage could host the VM that runs
> the Pharo Smalltalk virtual image. http://pharo.org/ .
>
>
>
> A bit of back ground, most Smalltalk systems consist of two components, a
> virtual image which contains the entire state of the system including
> classes, method bytecodes, user data etc. and a virtual machine that runs
> the image. The image is usually bit compatible from host OS to host OS.
> Pharo Smalltalk is part of the Squeak family of Smalltalk where the VM is
> written in a dialect of Smalltalk called Slang, from this C code is
> generated with some variations depending on host. The C code is then
> complied using the platform compiler. To ease portability the Squeak family
> asks as little of the host as possible, typically just memory, storage,
> network, a single windowed drawing surface and, user input events. In
> particular no UI or graphics system calls, the Squeak windowing system is
> rendered by Squeak itself. For servers Squeak can be made to run headless
> without any UI.
>
>
>
> There is a Squeak project underway to create an âembeddableâ version of
> Squeak. If that existed as a C library would it be possible in principle to
> host that library on Mirage OS? Any ideas on how to proceed? I looked at
> http://openmirage.org/blog/modular-foreign-function-bindings and if I
> understand correctly it looks like a c library could be linked to Mirage and
> Mirage configured so as to call the entry point on boot. The Library could
> then call back into Mirage to set sockets and other resources.
>
>
>
> If this worked for the Squeak VM I image a similar approach could be to host
> other languages, for example Scheme. Actually now that I think of it a small
> embeddable Scheme system may be a simpler place to start.
>
>
>
> Any comments welcome, apologies if any of this is hopelessly naÃve as
> regards Mirage.

Should work. You could look at the nocrypo library for an example of
using ctypes to link to C code:

  https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-nocrypto

This shows how to get the build system to compile the cstubs
definitions to C and OCaml stubs, for Unix and Xen, and then use them
in the rest of the code. It would be good to have a simpler example
though, and scheme might be a good place to start.

Either way, you'll want to expose the bindings as a separate OPAM
package and then depend on that in your unikernel, so that Mirage can
generate the Makefile automatically (it can't handle C stubs provided
directly by the unikernel at present).


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard        http://0install.net/
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