Le 14/01/2015 04:39, Joerg Beekmann, DeepCove Labs a écrit :
Hi
I've been exploring the possibility of hosting the Squeak/Pharo VM on MirageOS. MirageOS is a Unikernal or "Library OS" where rather than creating an executable to be run on Linux the compiler analyses dependencies right down through the device drivers and creates a kernel that can be booted on Amazon AWS EC2. http://www.openmirage.org/ http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628 http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/01/13/unikernels-library-operating-systems-for-...
It seems to me that having a Smalltalk hosed in this environment would be quite useful on a number of fronts: * A simple build and deploy of Smalltalk to the cloud. The Mirage group is building unikernals from sources and then because they are small committing the entire kernel to GitHub and then pushing the kernel to AWS EC2. Web sites and APIs are an obvious application. http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-lines/. * Smalltalk on small devices. The Mirage group is running Xen with mirage on small Intel and ARM boards. See http://openmirage.org/blog/announcing-mirage-20-release/. * These kernels can be very small, on the order of 0.25Meg for minimal HTTP servers with boot times in the ms range. A project called Jitsu https://github.com/MagnusS/jitsu modifies a DNS server to boot kernels in response to socket requests. The system making the request is unaware of the boot. * The Mirage group envisions thousands of kernels running on a single Hypervisor with his speed inter-kernel communications. See http://openmirage.org/blog/update-on-vchan. The facilitates Smalltalk systems consisting of a swarm of communicating images where each image is single threaded and concurrency is via message passing.
I've corresponded with the MirageOS group asking if they thought a language VM could be hosted on Mirage. The discussion is here: http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos-devel/2015-01/msg00053.ht.... Assuming we understood each other it seems the answer is "yes that should be possible".
My question is what would be involved on the Smalltalk side? I presume the effort is going to be mostly in the VM. Based on the conversation on the Mirage list I think the VM will need to be able to run a Library with an entry point called by Mirage. That seems similar to the " Embedding/VM as a DLL" project proposed here: http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/cog-projects/. Is this project active? The comment indicates this is mostly refactoring & repackaging. Anyone have a perspective on this?
Best regards
Joerg
Given that the openmirage kernel is written mostly in ocaml, I think that the "port" of the vm could imply quite some work, like rewriting the plugins (socket at first), dealing with Ocaml bindings etc. and not easy at all. Digging into that, I went across the rump kernel, and think that it may be much simpler to deal with than openmirage, with some nice other features (micro or dedicated kernels) that could make the pharo system a pharo os. see http://rumpkernel.org/ and http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2012/isbn9789526049175/isbn9789526049175.pdf It is still a unix kernel (NetBDS) written in C so more friendly to lot of developers and much simpler for pharo vm port integrates well in xen and other hypervisors can be run without the hypervisor platform can be tailored at will, and give very lean systems. Extremely interesting -- Regards, Alain