Hello Erlang Rump

Say hello to Erlang Microkernel powered by Rumprun unikernel. This project is apart from many things an example of running Erlang microkernel powered by the Rumprun unikernel.

The project is under active development and hence lacks details on what else this project is supposed to do. If I were to give keywords to this project then it will be.

• Erlang
• Rumprun
• Unikernel
• Microservices Architecture
• AI (huh! sort of)
• HTML5
• Javascript

Software Dependencies

This project requires a Gnu/Linux or Mac OS X with a modern gnu c/c++ compiler (preferably v5.3.0+ because I use that one and tested with it). Some of the software dependencies are as listed below. Note that the build scripts are setup to take the latest Rumprun unikernel and build the software, so in case you dont like it edit the scripts appropriately.

• g++ v3.8+
• openssl

A Sneak Peak

Development Environment Setup

Although the installation for various GNU/Linux distributions differ but the dependencies are easily available on any one of them.

Ubuntu or Debian

The following commands were tested on Ubuntu 14.04 but things should be similar (if not same) on other releases and Debian.

The following commands needs to be as a system administrator or with sudo (as shown below) so that the relavent packages are installed in the system.

If your system is not updated then probably it is a good idea to do that before installing anything else.

sudo apt-get update

In case you prefer the GNU GCC compler then install g++ and openssl dev.

sudo apt-get install -y g++ libssl-dev

CentOS / Fedora / Redhat

The following commands were tested on Centos 7 but things should be similar (if not same) on other releases and Fedora or Redhat.

If your system is not updated then probably it is a good idea to do that before installing anything else.

sudo yum update

In case you prefer the GNU GCC compler then install g++ and openssl

sudo yum install -y gcc-c++ openssl-devel

The versions gcc (g++) and clang which are installed in your (rpm based) operating needs to meet the previously mentioned criteria. At the time of this writing CentOS 7, Fedora 23, RHEL 7 are the latest releases and works well. Anything earlier may not work for you unless you are willing to get under the hood and build things on your own.

Archlinux

If your system is not updated then probably it is a good idea to do that before installing anything else.

sudo pacman -Syu

In case you prefer the GNU GCC compler then install g++ and openssl

sudo pacman -Sy gcc-multilib openssl

Motivation

The motivation as indicated earlier is partly to demonstrate how Erlang applications can be built and run over the Erlang microkernel (powered by Rumprun unikernel) and partly for other reasons which will be discussed once the projects starts taking shape. Stay tuned!

Build

After you are done setting up the development environment the build is pretty straight-forward (see below).

git clone https://github.com/neeraj9/hello-erlang-rump
cd hello-erlang-rump
make

The build will automatically build the Erlang application unikernel.

Enable tap0 interface and enable ip address to it as follows:

sudo ip tuntap add tap0 mode tap
sudo ip addr add 10.0.120.100/24 dev tap0
sudo ip link set dev tap0 up

Now you can run the Erlang microkernel as follows (in this case helloer app):

PATH=$(pwd)/build/rumprun/rumprun/bin:$PATH ./run-vm --virt=kvm --iso=helloer-0.1.0.iso

Alternatively, if you dont have kvm but just qemu then do the following:

PATH=$(pwd)/build/rumprun/rumprun/bin:$PATH ./run-vm --iso=helloer-0.1.0.iso

The output will stream to serial.log, so open another window and monitor that as follows:

tail -f serial.log

There is a substantial difference when running the unikernel in kvm (much faster) than simple qemu. Although, qemu does run things reasonably well but just slower.

Thanks

Thanks for evaluating this project and hope you find it useful. Feel free to create issues for bugs or new features.

Authors

• Neeraj Sharma {github: neeraj9}