[MirageOS-devel] beta testing netbooting MirageOS on Amazon, Google & Digital Ocean

[Andrew Stuart <andrew.stuart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

I built a website to make it easy to netboot Run-From-RAM operating systems 
like MirageOS on cloud hosts (Google, Amazon & Digital Ocean).

I wanted to see if anyone might be interested to give it a try as a beta test.

It’s absolutely brand new so likely has bugs and issues.

website is https://www.bootrino.com
documentation is https://doc.bootrino.com
console is https://console.bootrino.com

Let me know if you’re interested cause I’d be interested to help directly if 
any issues come up.

In regards specifically to MirageOS, the final outcomes have been a mixed bag.

bootrino happily boots MirageOS Run-From-RAM on all clouds when run as a Linux 
process.  There’s an example there that when it boots up launches a conduit web 
server.  This is a good result but it’s pretty expected given that all Linux 
implementations run on all clouds given enough fiddling.  So 100% success 
starting MirageOS on Linux with bootrino.  I’ll run this for a few days: 
http://54.241.142.226/ if you’d like to see it working.

Somewhat disappointingly, I have not succeeded in getting MirageOS via Solo5 to 
work at all on any cloud for a variety of reasons.  

** Amazon EC2 - It’s easy to understand why not on Amazon - because 
Solo5/MirageOS does not support Xen/HVM.
** Google COmpute Engine - It *should* work on Google Compute Engine but I’ve 
not been able to work out why it doesn’t despite a fair attempt. What we know 
for sure is that both Martin Lucina and myself have booted Solo5/MirageOS 
successfully on Google Compute Engine directly with nothing to do with bootrino 
- so it does work on Google Compute Engine. 
This works when Solo5/MirageOS is the first operating system to load after the 
Google virtual machine instance is powered on. Strangely, Solo5/MirageOS does 
not boot if a previous Linux operating system booted on the same instance, 
which is wha bootrino does at least during the initial startup. Martin and I 
exchanged emails about this a long while back and we didn’t get to the bottom 
of it but Martin’s suspicion was that perhaps Linux does some sort of initial 
reset of the virtual drivers, in a way that Solo5 does not.  It’s a strange 
problem because I would have imagined that a rebooted machine has a clean 
initial state that is the same as the initial state of a powered up machine but 
I guess this is not the case. 
** Digital Ocean - Digital Ocean is likely to have exactly the same issues as 
Google because it is KVM.  However, there is another problem here which is that 
Google COmpute Engine uses DHCP for its network configuration, but Digital 
Ocean uses a static network configuration.  As far as I’m aware there is no way 
to feed a static network config into MirageOS/Solo5 via syslinux.cfg  So no go 
here either.

It’s a pity because bootrino, whilst it’s focus now is booting any 
“Run-From-RAM” operating system, initially was intended as a solution for 
making it super easy to boot unikernels on cloud hosts, so I would have liked 
it to solve that problem.  The issues above may be solved in time (and if 
anyone would like to work with me on solving them I’ll do what I can), but in 
the meantime, MirageOS enthusiasts might get some satisfaction from being able 
to boot MirageOS successfully on any cloud even though it’s MirageOS under 
Linux rather than MirageOS as a Unikernel.

Here are the documentation notes for building bootrino MirageOS/Linux
https://doc.bootrino.com/mirageosonlinux.html

Here are the documentation notes for building bootrino MirageOS/Solo5
https://doc.bootrino.com/mirageosunikernel.html

Anyhow if you’re intersted in having a try I’d welcome beta testers cause its 
unused by anyone but me right now and needs outside eyes.

thanks!

Andrew




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