Re: [MirageOS-devel] [Minios-devel] [Xen-API] [RFC] Unicore Subproject Proposal

[Simon Kuenzer <simon.kuenzer@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Anil,

On 13.09.2017 12:11, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> On 11 Sep 2017, at 13:08, Simon Kuenzer <simon.kuenzer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Just my 2 cents:
> > > 1. Is this academic project, or it have specific goals and areas of 
> > > application? Would be good to have some practical use-cases and well formulated 
> > > list of problems (we all feel these by guts, but...), it aiming to solve. IMHO 
> > > that will help to prioritize functionality and get usable result faster :)
> > It is kind of both, however we aim a strong focus on real world problems: IoT, 
> > Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), Automotive, Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), and 
> > others.
> > We have played with many Unikernels (ClickOS, Mirage, Rump, OSv, and others) 
> > and tried to apply them in the several areas. While doing this, we noticed that 
> > each area benefits differently from the properties that Unikernels give - which 
> > is great (e.g., instant boot times for MEC, high performance for NFV, resource 
> > efficiency for IoT). However, building and maintaining new Unikernels (as we 
> > did with ClickOS, MiniCache, and Minipython) is currently painful.
> > Because of different focuses on properties and ported/implemented applications, 
> > most Unikernel today are bound to their own OS layers (e.g., ClickOS uses a 
> > different Mini-OS than Mirage). Each application requires a different subset of 
> > OS layers but also enables different optimizations of them.
> >
> > In order to solve this, we came up with the Unicore proposal. But I agree with 
> > your suggestion at this point: It helps for the project start to focus on some 
> > initial areas. For now, I hope this is driven by the first contributors, and I 
> > have personally IoT in mind. Since the project goal is so ambitious, we should 
> > keep the long-term goal in mind from the beginning.
> Thanks very much for kicking off this initiative. Maintaining a forked MiniOS 
> has been a multi-year source of a maintenance burden for MirageOS, and we would 
> love to be more aligned with an upstream version and benefit from new features 
> such as (e.g.) HVM booting.
We have the same burden with ClickOS and all the other unikernels we 
have built. Features like HVM booting or support for different 
hypervisors, are always something that users ask for. Since many 
Unikernel projects struggle with this, I would like to have the 
maintenance effort of a common base concentrated.
But we also learned that each Unikernel has own requirements: This is 
why Unicore has to provide full configuration flexibility. Only then, 
all Unikernel projects could really benefit from it.
So, I think we should all focus on the Unicore base and make our 
individual projects successful with it ;-).
>  From a MirageOS perspective, we'd be happy to switch to something that can 
> give us just enough MiniOS for our ocaml-freestanding [1] code to boot on Xen.  
> One requirement from our side is that we need to strip down MiniOS to remove 
> even the C xenstore implementation, since we have pure OCaml gnt, xenstore and 
> device driver implementations.  We'd be happy to try out an alpha Unicore and 
> let you know what is in excess to our needs as soon as you have something to 
> publish.
Sure, lets do this! ;-) This is perfectly inline with the goals we 
target with the Unicore build system.
> So full support from MirageOS for this initiative!
Thank you so much!

> regards,
> Anil
Simon

> [1] https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-freestanding/
>
>
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Simon Kuenzer
シモン クゥンツァー
Research Scientist,
Networked Systems and Data Analytics Group
NEC Laboratories Europe, Network Research Division
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Tel.     +49 (0)6221 4342-264
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e-mail:  simon.kuenzer@xxxxxxxxx
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