21–30 of 92 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this the same idea behind unikernels?
Mirage is a unikernel. The catch here is Ocaml. You can design your unikernel "bare metal" in any way you want and make it do nothing but the essentials you need ... and design it in any language you want as long as that language is OCaml.
I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…
I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…
But what's the benefit of cutting out the full-blown operating system? It's rare that such things would be the bottleneck.
Similar to trying to run containers bare metal directly on top of type 1 hypervisors, except unikernels are designed for this purpose.
Also with a bit living inside Docker. https://mirage.io/blog/2022-04-06.vpnkit
Weren't they at some point acquired by Docker?
I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…
> there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Pretty big except though. This concept has been done multiple times and has always failed. It's solving a problem that few care about.
Personal pet-peeve (from Requirements page): > (…) They should build on any modern UNIX (or macOS) system with OCaml and OPAM installed. (…) I just checked. MacOS Sonoma is STILL UNIX certified, and I get that wording “any modern UNIX” would not be clear this minor error annoys me. s/or MacOS/including MacOS/
I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…
> there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Pretty big except though. This concept has been done multiple times and has always failed. It's solving a problem that few care about.
Security?
Also with a bit living inside Docker. https://mirage.io/blog/2022-04-06.vpnkit
Weren't they at some point acquired by Docker?