Robert talks to Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy of the Cambridge University (UK) Systems research group about the OCaml language and the Mirage cloud operating system, a microkernel written entirely in OCaml. The outline includes: history of the evolution from dedicated servers running a monolithic operating system to virutalized servers based on the Xen hypervisor to micro-kernels; the differences between monolithic kernels, exokernels and micro-kernels; recent innovations that have allowed micro-kernels to overcome performance problems; performance of micro-kernels compared to a Linux server running a daemon for simple services like DNS and HTTP; security of micro-kernels; the history of the OCaml language; how the functional programming and the OCaml type system supports the design goals of the Mirage micro-kernel; how the Mirage team decided on OCaml as the implementation language for their project; the reconception of the toolchain that has Mirage kernels and compiled and managed via github; the possibility of using other popular web programming languages within Mirage; high-bandwidth networking abstractions in OCaml over Xen memory rings; and micro-kernels in the browser and peripheral devices. They wrap up with a discussion of Anil’s recent book on OCaml.
Show Notes
Related Links
- Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud by Anil Madhavapeddy, Richard Mortier, Charalampos Rotsos, David Scott, Balraj Singh, Thomas Gazagnaire, Steven Smith, Steven Hand and Jon Crowcroft
- Xen hypervisor
- The Mirage project: http://openmirage.org/
- Anil Madhavapeddy’s talk at QCon San Francisco 2013 My Other Internet is a Mirage: www.infoq.com/presentations/mirage-os
- Real World OCaml: Functional programming for the masses by Yaron Minsky, Anil Madhavapeddy, Jason Hickey
- Anil Madhavapeddy’s talk at FOSDEM Mirage: compiling functional library operating systems
- Anil Madhavapeddy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/avsm
- Anil Madhavapeddy’s home page: http://anil.recoil.org/
- Anil Madhavapeddy’s blog: http://anil.recoil.org/blog/
- Anil Madhavapeddy’s publications: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/
- The OPAM package manager for OCaml: http://opam.ocaml.org/
- The Codio web IDE for OCaml: https://codio.com/s/docs/specifics/ocaml/
- Irmin distributed database written in OCaml: https://github.com/mirage/irmin
Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy gives a passionate interview about the compilation, decoupling and encapsulation of useful components. With all the fervor @docker , I think this relates to future, dare I say ultimate, containerization.
Great interview, very technical, but still extremely useful.
Another excellent episode! Although Anil speaks at 100km/h he’s understandable and clear. Thanks!
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