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Weekly Meeting: 2015-11-11
By Amir Chaudhry - 2015-11-11

Agenda

  • Functoria release
  • Logging
  • Pioneer Projects
  • List of Protocols
  • mirage-www deployment
  • Unikernel logo contest

Attendees: Atluxitiv, Daniel Bunzli, Amir Chaudhry (chair), Justin Cormack, Thomas Gazagnaire, David Kaloper, Thomas Leonard, Anil Madhavapeddy, Richard (Mort) Mortier, Mindy Preston, Gabriel Radanne and Dave Scott

Notes

Functoria release

See release tracking in mirage/mirage#447

Work on functoria is progressing and ThomasG finished doing his review and is generally happy with the PRs. There are a few issues to deal with that are not related to functoria itself. The most important issues have been resolved. A few people have tried things and said they were happy with it. It would really benefit from more public testing and we've asked MattG to take a look.

Need to fix the mirage-www deployment scripts first (see below) and then use functoria there and see that it works properly. Gabriel offered to redo the commits that ThomasG had to revert.

Mindy and Jeremy have also been trying to write a front end to functoria (ncurses etc) — Mindy was trying to write a JavaScript one. This would showcase the other side of functoria for users of the libs (rather than just for MirageOS developers).

There's a blog post to go along with the release (mirage/mirage-www#369), which has been reviewed and the remaining TODOs have been addressed. Waiting for a few things to be fixed before release and we don't want to rush this. The next step will be to begin tagging things.

Logging

A few people are trying out Daniel's Logs library. It would be good if ThomasL can take a look at it in an lwt context. It's actually being tried out in the ocaml-9p lib (mirage/ocaml-9p#18). We might be able to use this in functoria but needs more discussion.

We should prod for more of the logging discussion to happen on the main mailing list.

Pioneer Projects

Outreachy — We're still in the Outreachy process and Hannes has been taking care of things. The current stage is the application process so we're waiting to hear the outcome (due on 17th Nov).

Charrua — There's a PR to mirage-skeleton to look at (mirage/mirage-skeleton#105), which should be tried out. Currently, it doesn't seem to compile with OCaml 4.01 so should fix that and come back. Mort will look in on this and report back in the next call.

List of implemented protocols

There was a suggestion to create a list of implemented protocols and their status. This means manually making a list on the wiki-page. There was a reminder that we also want to start using the Opam metadata tags to track the MirageOS libraries in Opam — adding a protocol tag might help filter these. Sometimes you need more data that you'd find in the opam metadata field so a wiki-page is still useful.

The types of Opam tags were also discussed as we would use one to denote those libraries that are maintained by MirageOS and others that offer certain features that MirageOS can make use of.

mirage-www deployment issues

See discussion in mirage/mirage-www#404

Recently there have been a few issues with the MirageOS website unikernel. We've now put couple of fixes in scripts so they're run from outside the script directory and things should start properly. Also pushed a PR this morning that will remove all the old bzip images as we don't need them. Haven't yet updated the TravisCI scripts to remove the old scripts.

A suggestion that having an Opam repo hash would be useful (i.e. the state of Opam repo at the time the unikernel was built). That way we can reconstruct anything with the just the hash and the config.ml

There were issues with xvda and xvdb, where it seems there was a mismatch between assumptions in the various scripts. ThomasG can try to test things on the live site today.

We also want to get blobs.openmirage.org running as a unikernel too, probably using the Crunch file system. However, this will need to have something dynamically attached so will need to work on that.

Unikernel logo contest

Amir has started a Unikernel Logo contest on 99designs. The intent is to come up with a design that the community can use to promote unikernels. The initial phase is to prepare a brief and then allow designers to submit initial designs. At some point, the process needs to involve more members of the community so their views can also be incorporated (though we should be wary of 'design by committee'). This process is likely to take several weeks — it shouldn't be rushed as we intend to use the winning logo for some time.

At the moment, there are 211 logos to look through!

--

AoB

  • Delayed notes: apologies that notes have not been on the website quickly after the call. Suggestion that perhaps we put them on a GitHub wiki and build the website from there (using functoria).

  • nocrypto on OpenBSD - DavidK has been working on this and needs feedback. Things are broken on OpenBSD as versions of gcc etc seem to be different. Anil can try this out and also suggested emailing OpenBSD ports. Once things work, we can cut a release!

  • The next call is scheduled for Wednesday, 25th November. Please add any agenda items you wish to discuss in advance and refer to the mailing list for actual details a day or so in advance.