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
