Hello list,
This is the report of the meeting of 20/07/2022. We have decided to hold
the next meeting on 7 September 2022 (14:00, CEST). Have a good holiday and
enjoy.
## MirageOS ecosystem
romain: I will do the next release of Solo5/mirage-solo5/mirage-xen/mirage
to integrate the patch of Pierre about metrics (about memory consumption).
haesbert: Why we did about Solo5 (stats about `malloc()`)
pierre: we count the whole memory allocted (by a simple subtraction), so
it's much faster than before (before, we used malloc_footprint()). So now
we can introspect the memory usage of the whole unikernel. It's a small
adaptation of dlmalloc.
haesbert: What is dlmalloc?
pierre: simple implementation of malloc used by Solo5
## Haesbaert turn
haesbert: working for Tarides, my longer project: think about MirageOS and
OCaml multicore. Look up on Solo5. We don't have a plan yet but we need to
move on multicore. Looked at Firecracker. Solo5 still is the best approach.
The basic idea to support solo5: Solo5 is elegant and really simple.
For OCaml 5, you need the idea of stacks.
It's hard to create an unikernel (no documentation, etc.)
New backend or improve Solo5?
Romain: simulate multiple core with one vcpu
haesbert: you still need to do a lot of work, my personal goal ..., my
second goal is to make Solo5 really fast. Maybe focus on hvt first (see spt
after).
Romain: muen still must be supported
Pierre: Xen too
haesbert: that's fine I think
haesbest: may be mixed on top of HVT the Virtio backend. We still provide
both.
haesbeaert: maybe you are true to try to fake an implementation of pthread
and dig in then into to implement real multicore for OCaml 5
Romain: mirage-tcpip?
haesbert: I don't know too much about it but I tried to see the fix. The
fix seems correct. Maybe we can do something nicer.
Romain: may be the best is to try and provide outcomes to help Hannes about
TCP/IP stack
haesbert: lot of works between libraries (MirageOS ecosystem) and multicore
because the whole stack depends on lwt
Romain: yes, but most of the core libraries don't depend on lwt (state
machine, protocol, etc). But we don't have the time to maintain eio support
for instance - so maybe someone should take care about that.
## Reynir turn
Reynir: I'm looking for MirageOS inside Docker. How we can deploy an
unikernel inside a Docker (tap interface and so one). I used the SPT target
to deploy into the docker and its work.
## Timada turn
Timada: I would like to share my progress, implementing Solo5 for
microcontrollers: I just finished implementing {console, cpu, memory}
initialisation. Now I need to implement the time initialisation. My goal is
to make a simple unikernel with the Console device - doing step by step.
Haesbert: Which controller you said?
Timada: https://www.ti.com/product/AM6442
## Pierre turn
pierre: I'm still stuck on the circuit creation on the Tor protocol. NAT
the traffic into the Tor network. I can contact the first node but I need
to tell the first node to extend to a second one. I have to get the
encryption key for the handshake. I'm not sure if I got the true key - I
did something wrong about that.
pierre: Probably, I don't clearly understand the Tor protocol but I hope
(in my vacation) to find something. I need to do something for September
because I will get some students (2 or 3) to work on the Tor protocol. I
don't want to let my student implement the circuit - to let them work on
some higher questions.
pierre: If you want to help, we can do some visio (to Romain).
pierre: About the retreat?
romain: Hannes said something about October, we will try to confirm as soon
as possible and send an email about that
## Romain turn
Work on bob, I did a PoC which can transmit files and folders through a
unikernel.
That is mainly what I did, see https://github.com/dinosaure/bob. Currently,
I'm on Windows support.
--
The report was a bit chaotic as I intervened several times (and could not
write at the same time). If I have forgotten any information or
misinterpreted/written what you said, please add to it. Have a good holiday!
--
Romain Calascibetta - http://din.osau.re/
