MirageOS hands-on

In this main README.md you find the general links and setup instructions for getting to an initial environment for running Mirage unikernels. You will find further specific instructions inside the unikernels directories.

Setup

• OCaml, Opam (package manager) and the MirageOS library installation instructions can be found at
  • Linux/Unix/OSX
    • https://mirage.io/wiki/install
  • Windows + Windows Subsystem for Linux (I havn't tested this with Mirage)
    • http://themargin.io/2017/02/02/OCaml_on_win/
• Editor setup (type-check in-code, code-completion, type-at-point, jump-to-location, indentation, documentation)
  • Opam user setup (app to automatically setup editor configuration)
    • https://github.com/AltGr/opam-user-setup

Common Mirage unikernel development workflow

mirage cleanup
mirage configure --net=socket -t unix   # here several possible configuration-options exist
make depend   
make
./your-unikernel   # run the unikernel (will be named what you specified in config.ml)

If you have already run the previous once, and have not added any new packages to the dependencies in config.ml, you can just run make && ./your-unikernel. Else for major changes to config.ml you need to run the whole clean-config-depend-make chain.

./your-unikernel --help   # to open the custom man-page for your own unikernel (:

Helpful Mirage development links

• Types for arguments of your 'Main' functor: http://docs.mirage.io/mirage-types-lwt/Mirage_types_lwt/index.html
• Search for Opam packages: https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/
  • Find links to the packages documentation from here, or read the *.mli files contained in your local opam folder with libraries (they are usually well documented). Find this folder with opam var lib.
• Mirage modules documentation: http://mirage.github.io/mirage/
  • Note that Mirage depends on other libraries in some of the module interfaces, so when you see a line in a Mirage module like include Functoria.KEY, this means that the types in the Functoria.KEY module are also part of the current module. Therefore also lookup the documentation for Functoria if you want to understand the full interface.

Links for further reading

• MirageOS official Hello World guide: https://mirage.io/wiki/hello-world
• MirageOS official example unikernels - a good place to start your own unikernels from: https://github.com/mirage/mirage-skeleton

Pioneer projects to contribute to on MirageOS

See https://github.com/mirage/mirage-www/wiki/Pioneer-Projects

Projects using Mirage

• Nymote: MirageOS for private cloud and ownership of own data
  • http://nymote.org/blog/
• Getting Things Done app for the browser (merging of state between browser tabs etc.)
  • http://www.roscidus.com/blog/blog/2015/04/28/cuekeeper-gitting-things-done-in-the-browser/

Interesting libraries

• Irmin (Git-like distributed datastore)
  • Irmin github: https://github.com/mirage/irmin
  • EzIrmin (easy wrapper for Irmin) guide: https://github.com/kayceesrk/ezirmin
    • Note: EzIrmin not compatible with Mirage for now, but interesting read
• TyXML : https://ocsigen.org/tyxml/
  • Typesafe Html5 and Svg
• Vg by Daniel Bünzli (and all his other libraries!) : http://erratique.ch/software/vg
  • Functional declarative vector-graphics with cut instead of paste semantics.