Re: [Publicity] rump kernel and Rumprun unikernel proposed post

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 1 Aug 2015, at 14:17, Antti Kantee <pooka@xxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> [added mato to cc]
> 
> On 31/07/15 17:27, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
>> (Thanks Russ for sorting out my login)
>> 
>> Great post! Some quick thoughts from vacation:
>> 
>> - In the "the goal of rump was not unikernels", it might be worth pointing 
>> out that Rump provides a long term baseline for other unikernel projects 
>> that have been focussing on the high level structure.  For example, Martin's 
>> work on Mirage+rump now lets us slowly deprecate the old MiniOS runtime in 
>> favour of Rump, and get KVM and baremetal support in addition to Xen, and 
>> focus on the "new horizons" rather than low level device driver hackery.
> 
> Hmm, I wonder if I can succinctly work that in.  I think I should stress that 
> the idea to is to provide a proper architecture so that projects using rump 
> kernels don't need to fork their own copies, and encourage discussion if the 
> architecture or implementation falls short of someone's needs.  Forking is 
> nice for a quick thrill, but when you hit the maintenance stage it's suddenly 
> not so fun.
> 
> I assume that Martin will write about "Mirump" in detail himself, but I guess 
> I can mention it to strengthen the above argument.  Would something in the 
> order of "yaddayadda... the MirageOS unikernel has already started taking 
> advantage of this feature [Martin Lucina]" be appropriate?  Plus a link to:
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.mirage.devel/954
> 

Only if it makes sense within the post!  Not sure it does, as there's quite a 
lot in there already.  Perhaps the best thing to do is to wait for Martin to 
write up his, and then retrospectively edit in a link to it as "further 
reading" in this one.  We do that fairly often in the MirageOS blog so that 
posts remain easy to follow after later ones have been published.

>> - Link to the third-party applications Rump github repo?
> 
> ah, definitely.
> 
>> - A TL;DR with some hrefs into the rump kernel book on some of the 
>> terminology would be useful for the more casual reader.  You mention in one 
>> blog post -- rump kernel, unikernel and anykernel -- quite a lot to take in 
>> one post :) Your FOSDEM 2013 interview on the topic is good: 
>> https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/interviews/2013-antii-kantee/ or your New 
>> Directions in Operating Systems 2014 talk.
> 
> The problem with the tl;dr is that it's hard to explain things to a global 
> audience when I don't know what their *assumptions* are and which specific 
> piece they are interested in -- even though the pieces are bite-sized, 
> there's a lot of them.  Mini-anecdote: it took years for people to stop 
> saying "oh you've reinvented FUSE".  So, the book is the only thing I trust 
> to explain things in a hard-to-misassume way.  But I'll add some tl;dr if I 
> can figure out what to add.
> 
> I'll see if I can somehow remove "anykernel".  My in-house reviewer 
> complained about that as well.  The problem is that I doubt the figure works 
> if "anykernel" is not there, so I need to think of something else.

Or just elide it entirely from this apart from an href, and then elaborate in a 
future blog post.  A series of blog posts about one particular topic each is 
probably a good approach, with hrefs between them.

Either way, excellent post!

-a


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