Weekly Meeting: 2014-06-24

Agenda

Mirage 1.2 release
- repo liveness
ARM update
Blog posts pre-OSCON
Bytemark machines

Attendees: Amir Chaudhry (chair), Thomas Gazagnaire, Thomas Leonard, Anil Madhavapeddy, Hannes Mehnert and David Scott

Notes

Mirage 1.2 release

Looks in pretty good shape for a release soon. Just makefiles and SSL, Should be one last change. Hannes will send patch to add entropy type in v1. Need 16 bytes. Could generate a fixed amount of entropy in kernel but have to be careful not to use same unikernel twice (not great).

Xen doesn't provide anything but Dave just added frontend and backend things for Xen that might help. Should have something better by next Xen release Overall, won't block on this for 1.2.0.

For makefiles, may need to go back through tutorials and add relevant bits.

Repos - Balraj did a lot of work to pull together the libs and you can see them in the TROVE file so if there are others please add them there (also see the email to the list. This is partly about increasing visibility so people know what is available. For example, could add 0install there.

ARM update

Testing on Xen unstable branch where addresses are changed. Means rewriting early boot stuff to do fancy virtual memory mapping stuff (collective groan).

Others should try external minios. Just try to getting it compiling and that will be useful.

Blog posts pre-OSCON

The TLS library is getting ready for a public alpha and they are writing blog posts for each of the new libs. There are other libs too, which we should write about before OSCON.

TLS (Hannes/David): overview of TLS, Post on API, TLS attacks/mitigations, Mirage integration, asn1 lib, x509 lib, nocrypto lib.
Vchan (Jon L)
Ctypes (Jeremy): Useful for inter-VM lib linking
Minios/ARM (Thomas L)
Irmin (Thomas G)
Conduit (Anil)

These posts should be written in advance and reviewed by others before going up on the site. Amir will help coordinate this.

Bytemark machines

Amir still hasn't sorted out his access in order to deploy his dusty unikernels. He'll keep mentioning it until he actually get around to sorting out an SSH key with Anil/Dave.

AoB

We should get a clear list of new libraries since the 1.0 release. Trove helps with this
Discussion of Conduit