Re: [MirageOS-devel] OCaml and Mirage now running on rumprun, including bare metal

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 22 May 2015, at 17:33, Martin Lucina <martin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Friday, 22.05.2015 at 16:17, Antti Kantee wrote:
>> On 22/05/15 15:35, Martin Lucina wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> in the spirit of "announce early and often", I now have a working OCaml
>>> cross compiler toolchain building unikernels with the rumprun stack[1], and
>>> basic support for Mirage OS working.
>> 
>> Good show!  Supporting existing platforms and applications while
>> enabling things to be done better where it matters most is a true
>> realization of the rump kernel slogan "you can make an omelette
>> without breaking the kitchen".
>> 
>> That said, can you expand on the motivations behind your work with a
>> paragraph or so?  I don't recall the project being introduced at
>> least on the rump kernel kernel list, and I while can guess the
>> motivations, I'd rather not guess if I don't have to ;)
> 
> The Mirage folks have built a green-field implementation of a TCP/IP, TLS
> and HTTP stack, all in memory-safe OCaml. What I'd like to get to is
> being able to build systems which use the best of both worlds. For example,
> have a Mirage unikernel serve TLS and/or HTTP, and talk FastCGI to a PHP
> backend running on a rumprun unikernel.
> 
> The other interesting aspect is using Jitsu [1] to spawn just-in-time
> unikernels on demand. This would let you have a bunch of unikernels which
> are dormant and are only booted when the service they provide is actually
> accessed.
> 

The other reason that this is so useful is that it opens up the other
non-Xen backends to Mirage (such as KVM) in the short term.  In the longer
term, we'd replace the virtio drivers with type-safe equivalents, but its
useful to be able to boot on KVM with the Rump drivers to get started
and have a stable point.

In general, the mixing of new type-safe drivers in Mirage/HaLVM and
newer languages such as Rust, combined with the stable Rump NetBSD drivers
is a pretty compelling way to migrate towards unikernels...

-anil


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