Mirage OS Logo
Home Blog Docs API Community

MirageOS 1.0: not just a hallucination!

By Anil Madhavapeddy - 2013-12-09

First: read the overview and technical background behind the project.

When we started hacking on MirageOS back in 2009, it started off looking like a conventional OS, except written in OCaml. The monolithic repository contained all the libraries and boot code, and exposed a big OS module for applications to use. We used this to do several fun tutorials at conferences such as ICFP/CUFP and get early feedback.

As development continued though, we started to understand what it is we were building: a "library operating system". As the number of libraries grew, putting everything into one repository just wasn't scaling, and it made it hard to work with third-party code. We spent some time developing tools to make Mirage fit into the broader OCaml ecosystem.

Three key things have emerged from this effort:

  • OPAM, a source-based package manager for OCaml. It supports multiple simultaneous compiler installations, flexible package constraints, and a Git-friendly development workflow. Since releasing 1.0 in March 2013 and 1.1 in October, the community has leapt in to contribute over 1800 packages in this short time. All of the Mirage libraries are now tracked using it, including the Xen libraries.
  • The build system for embedded programming (such as the Xen target) is a difficult one to get right. After several experiments, Mirage provides a single command-line tool that combines configuration directives (also written in OCaml) with OPAM to make building Xen unikernels as easy as Unix binaries.
  • All of the Mirage-compatible libraries satisfy a set of module type signatures in a single file. This is where Mirage lives up to its name: we've gone from the early monolithic repository to a single, standalone interface file that describes the interfaces. Of course, we also have libraries to go along with this signature, and they all live in the MirageOS GitHub organization.

With these components, I'm excited to announce that MirageOS 1.0 is finally ready to see the light of day! Since it consists of so many libraries, we've decided not to have a "big bang" release where we dump fifty complex libraries on the open-source community. Instead, we're going to spend the month of December writing a series of blog posts that explain how the core components work, leading up to several use cases:

  • The development team have all decided to shift our personal homepages to be Mirage kernels running on Xen as a little Christmas present to ourselves, so we'll work through that step-by-step how to build a dedicated unikernel and maintain and deploy it (spoiler: see this repo). This will culminate in a webservice that our colleagues at Horizon have been building using Android apps and an HTTP backend.
  • The XenServer crew at Citrix are using Mirage to build custom middlebox VMs such as block device caches.
  • For teaching purposes, the Cambridge Computer Lab team want a JavaScript backend, so we'll explain how to port Mirage to this target (which is rather different from either Unix or Xen, and serves to illustrate the portability of our approach).

How to get involved

Bear with us while we update all the documentation and start the blog posts off today (the final libraries for the 1.0 release are all being merged into OPAM while I write this, and the usually excellent Travis continuous integration system is down due to a bug on their side). I'll edit this post to contain links to the future posts as they happen.

Since we're now also a proud Xen and Linux Foundation incubator project, our mailing list is shifting to mirageos-devel@lists.xenproject.org, and we very much welcome comments and feedback on our efforts over there. The #mirage channel on FreeNode IRC is also growing increasingly popular, as is simply reporting issues on the main Mirage GitHub repository.

Several people have also commented that they want to learn OCaml properly to start using Mirage. I've just co-published an O'Reilly book called Real World OCaml that's available for free online and also as hardcopy/ebook. Our Cambridge colleague John Whittington has also written an excellent introductory text, and you can generally find more resources online. Feel free to ask beginner OCaml questions on our mailing lists and we'll help as best we can!