On 14 Jan 2015, at 08:15, Ben Coman <btc@openInWorld.com> wrote:On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 11:39 AM, Joerg Beekmann, DeepCove Labs <joerg@deepcovelabs.com> wrote: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-the-cloud/
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.html. 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
Mirarge might be a good stepping stone, but ultimately I think we want Cog running directly on the Xen "hardware" without Mirage. Erlang and Haskell are languages that already do this. [1] We need to get on that list at the bottom.Maybe a good starting place is SqueakNOS [2] since it is reported to work with Grub and there is PVGrub [3] [4].
btw, Did you see the discussion titled "Cog In The Cloud"and a little bit extra at the bottom of this one...