An Outing to CUFP 2011

The team signed up to do a tutorial at CUFP on the topic of Building a Functional OS, which meant zooming off to Tokyo! This was the first public show of the project, and resulted in a furious flurry of commits from the whole team to get it ready. The 45-strong crowd at the tutorial were really full of feedback, and particular thanks to Michael for organising the event, and Yaron, Marius, Steve, Wil, Adrian and the rest for shouting out questions regularly!

• The tutorial is a Mirage application, so you can clone it and view it locally through your web browser. The content is mirrored at tutorial.openmirage.org, although it does require cleanup to make it suitable to an online audience. The SVG integration is awkward and it only works on Chrome/Safari, so I will probably rewrite it using deck.js soon. The tutorial is a good showcase of Mirage, as it compiles to Xen, UNIX (both kernel sockets and direct tuntap) with a RAMdisk or external filesystem, and is a good way to mess around with application synthesis (look at the Makefile targets in slides/).

• Installation: instructions have been simplified, and we now only require OCaml on the host and include everything else in-tree. Thomas has also made Emacs and Vim plugins that are compatible with the ocamlbuild layout.

• Lwt: a new tutorial which walks you through the cooperative threading library we use, along with exercises (all available in mirage-tutorial). Raphael and Balraj are looking for feedback on this, so get in touch!

• Javascript: via node.js did not work in time for the tutorial, as integrating I/O is a tangled web that will take some time to sort out. Raphael is working on this in a separate tree for now. As part of this effort though, he integrated a pure OCaml regular expression library that does not require C bindings, and is surprisingly fast.

• Devices: we can now synthesise binaries that share common code but have very different I/O interfaces. This is due to a new device manager, and David also heroically wrote a complete FAT12/16/32 library that we demonstrated. Yaron Minsky suggested a different approach to the device manager using first-class modules instead of objects, so I am experimentally trying this before writing documentation on it.

• TCP: the notorious Mirage stack is far more robust due to our resident networking guru Balraj hunting down last-minute bugs. Although it held together with sticky tape during the tutorial, he is now adding retransmission and congestion control to make it actually standards-compliant. Still, if you dont have any packet loss, the unikernel version of this website does actually serve pages.

• OpenFlow: is a new standard for Software Defined Networking, and Haris and Mort have been hacking away at a complete implementation directly in Mirage! We will be giving a tutorial on this at the OFELIA summer school in November (it is summer somewhere, I guess). The prospect of a high-speed unikernel switching fabric for the cloud, programmed in a functional style, is something I am really looking forward to seeing!

• Jane Street Core: preceeding us was Yaron's Core tutorial. Since Mirage provides it own complete standard library, we can adopt portions of Core that do not require OS threads or UNIX-specific features. I really like the idea that Mirage enforces a discipline on writing portable interfaces, as dependencies on OS-specific features do sneak in insiduously and make switching to different platforms very difficult (e.g. Windows support). Incidentally, Yaron's ACM Queue article is a great introduction to OCaml.

So as you can see, it has been a busy few months! Much of the core of Mirage is settling down now, and we are writing a paper with detailed performance benchmarks of our various backends. Keep an eye on the Github milestone for the preview release, join our new mailing list, or follow the newly sentient openmirage on twitter!