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Posts/Retreat2024
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<p>Talking about time - I don't think anyone wants to have two different sleep functions in their application, similar for monotonic clock and posix time. Also the existing open source unikernels only use a single time and clock. The random interface has as well some history connected, since our cryptographic library used to bundle everything in a single opam package, and required arbitrary precision integers (via zarith using gmp), and we didn't want to impose a dependency on gmp for every unikernel. Nowadays, the CSPRNG code is separated from gmp, and we can just use it. The network interface: indeed if you're using solo5 (hvt or virtio or whatnot), you will never need a unix (tap-based) network implementation, neither xen netfront/netback. Thus, the functorisation is not necessary.</p>
<p>At the retreat we discussed and thought about replacing the functors in MirageOS with other mechanisms - conditional compilation (depending on the target) or the linking trick (dune variants) or a ppx are candidates, apart from other things (maybe first-class modules fit the requirement as well).</p>
<p>I got into coding a bit, and first looked into conditional compilation with the <a href="https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/library-dependencies.html#alternative-dependencies"><code>select</code></a> clauses from dune. They turned out to be not very flexible (you've to decide in the package what are all the options, and which one to take). I switched to <a href="https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/variants.html#dune-variants">dune variants</a>, where the idea is that you provide a virtual interface, and only when compiling the executable you specify the implementation. This is great, since the mirage tool (at mirage configure time) can emit the dependencies. I went ahead and defunctorised the whole network stack - it was nice to see it is possible, but this is not easily upstreamable. There's as well at least <a href="https://github.com/ocaml/dune/issues/10460">one issue</a> in the dune variant code, I'm sure it will get debugged and fixed once we decide that dune variants are the solution we want to try out.</p>
<p>The current result is a <a href="https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos-devel/2024-05/msg00002.html">mail to the development list</a>, and a <a href="https://github.com/mirage/mirage/pull/1529">defunctorising time PR</a>, as well as a <a href="https://github.com/mirage/mirage/pull/1533">bootvar PR</a> (relying on other PRs).</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>I found the retreat very inspiring, there were lots of interest in various topics, and a lot of projects have been worked on. I'm also very happy that I managed to contribute and start some projects that will hopefully ease MirageOS adaption -- both on the deployment side, but as well on the developer experience side.</p>
<p>I'm looking forward to other writeups and future retreats, or other events where I can say hi to attendees.</p>

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<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><link href="https://hannes.robur.coop/atom" rel="self"/><id>urn:uuid:981361ca-e71d-4997-a52c-baeee78e4156</id><title type="text">full stack engineer</title><updated>2024-05-15T14:41:39-00:00</updated><entry><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;My involvement and experience of the MirageOS retreat 2024&lt;/p&gt;
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><link href="https://hannes.robur.coop/atom" rel="self"/><id>urn:uuid:981361ca-e71d-4997-a52c-baeee78e4156</id><title type="text">full stack engineer</title><updated>2024-05-15T14:44:14-00:00</updated><entry><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;My involvement and experience of the MirageOS retreat 2024&lt;/p&gt;
</summary><published>2024-05-15T14:38:51-00:00</published><link href="/Posts/Retreat2024" rel="alternate"/><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;End of April I spent a week in Marrakech to work on MirageOS at our annual &lt;a href=&quot;https://retreat.mirage.io&quot;&gt;retreat&lt;/a&gt;. This was the 12th time when it actually took place, and it was amazing. We were a total of 17 people attending, of which 5 people used ground transportation. I have respect for them, to take the 3 or more day trip from Berlin or Glasgow or Paris or whereever to Marrakech - with a ferry in between (which availability depends on the wind etc.). This time, I didn't take ground transportation since I had appointments just before and just after the retreat nearby Berlin where I had to be in person. The food an weather was really nice and motivating.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Of the 17 people there were lots of new faces. It is really nice to see an active community which is welcoming to new people, and also that there's change: a lot of fresh ideas are brought by these people and we rethink what we are doing and why.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Our daily routine included breakfast, circle, lunch, dinner, (sometimes) presentations. There wasn't more formal structure, and there was no need for it since people kept themselves busy working on various projects. We had a bigger discussion about &amp;quot;deploying MirageOS&amp;quot;, which is a reoccurring theme. Even running a MirageOS unikernel on a laptop is for people who are not very familiar with networking pretty hard. In addition, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://mirage.io&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; only briefly described network setup, and included DHCP very early (which is overwhelming to setup and use on your laptop).&lt;/p&gt;
@ -14,12 +14,13 @@
&lt;p&gt;Talking about time - I don't think anyone wants to have two different sleep functions in their application, similar for monotonic clock and posix time. Also the existing open source unikernels only use a single time and clock. The random interface has as well some history connected, since our cryptographic library used to bundle everything in a single opam package, and required arbitrary precision integers (via zarith using gmp), and we didn't want to impose a dependency on gmp for every unikernel. Nowadays, the CSPRNG code is separated from gmp, and we can just use it. The network interface: indeed if you're using solo5 (hvt or virtio or whatnot), you will never need a unix (tap-based) network implementation, neither xen netfront/netback. Thus, the functorisation is not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;At the retreat we discussed and thought about replacing the functors in MirageOS with other mechanisms - conditional compilation (depending on the target) or the linking trick (dune variants) or a ppx are candidates, apart from other things (maybe first-class modules fit the requirement as well).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I got into coding a bit, and first looked into conditional compilation with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/library-dependencies.html#alternative-dependencies&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;select&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; clauses from dune. They turned out to be not very flexible (you've to decide in the package what are all the options, and which one to take). I switched to &lt;a href=&quot;https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/variants.html#dune-variants&quot;&gt;dune variants&lt;/a&gt;, where the idea is that you provide a virtual interface, and only when compiling the executable you specify the implementation. This is great, since the mirage tool (at mirage configure time) can emit the dependencies. I went ahead and defunctorised the whole network stack - it was nice to see it is possible, but this is not easily upstreamable. There's as well at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ocaml/dune/issues/10460&quot;&gt;one issue&lt;/a&gt; in the dune variant code, I'm sure it will get debugged and fixed once we decide that dune variants are the solution we want to try out.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The current result is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos-devel/2024-05/msg00002.html&quot;&gt;mail to the development list&lt;/a&gt;, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mirage/mirage/pull/1529&quot;&gt;defunctorising time PR&lt;/a&gt;, as well as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mirage/mirage/pull/1533&quot;&gt;bootvar PR&lt;/a&gt; (relying on other PRs).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2 id=&quot;conclusion&quot;&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I found the retreat very inspiring, there were lots of interest in various topics, and a lot of projects have been worked on. I'm also very happy that I managed to contribute and start some projects that will hopefully ease MirageOS adaption -- both on the deployment side, but as well on the developer experience side.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I'm looking forward to other writeups and future retreats, or other events where I can say hi to attendees.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We at &lt;a href=&quot;https://robur.coop&quot;&gt;Robur&lt;/a&gt; are working as a collective since 2018 on public funding, commercial contracts, and donations. Our mission is to get sustainable, robust, and secure MirageOS unikernels developed and deployed. Running your own digital communication infrastructure should be easy, including trustworthy binaries and smooth upgrades. You can help us continue our work by &lt;a href=&quot;https://aenderwerk.de/donate/&quot;&gt;donating&lt;/a&gt; (select Robur from the drop-down or put &amp;quot;donation Robur&amp;quot; in the purpose of the bank transfer).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions, reach us best via eMail to team AT robur DOT coop.&lt;/p&gt;
</content><category scheme="https://hannes.robur.coop/tags/community" term="community"/><category scheme="https://hannes.robur.coop/tags/mirageos" term="mirageos"/><id>urn:uuid:2c9e2634-78c5-5957-b6f2-d0706f80d7eb</id><title type="text">The MirageOS retreat 2024</title><updated>2024-05-15T14:41:39-00:00</updated><author><name>hannes</name></author></entry><entry><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Core Internet protocols require operational experiments, even if formally specified&lt;/p&gt;
</content><category scheme="https://hannes.robur.coop/tags/community" term="community"/><category scheme="https://hannes.robur.coop/tags/mirageos" term="mirageos"/><id>urn:uuid:2c9e2634-78c5-5957-b6f2-d0706f80d7eb</id><title type="text">The MirageOS retreat 2024</title><updated>2024-05-15T14:44:14-00:00</updated><author><name>hannes</name></author></entry><entry><summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;Core Internet protocols require operational experiments, even if formally specified&lt;/p&gt;
</summary><published>2023-11-28T21:17:01-00:00</published><link href="/Posts/TCP-ns" rel="alternate"/><content type="html">&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol&quot;&gt;Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)&lt;/a&gt; is one of the main Internet protocols. Usually spoken on top of the Internet Protocol (legacy version 4 or version 6), it provides a reliable, ordered, and error-checked stream of octets. When an application uses TCP, they get these properties for free (in contrast to UDP).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As common for Internet protocols, TCP is specified in a series of so-called requests for comments (RFC). The latest revised version from August 2022 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9293&quot;&gt;RFC 9293&lt;/a&gt;; the initial one was &lt;a href=&quot;https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc793&quot;&gt;RFC 793&lt;/a&gt; from September 1981.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h1 id=&quot;my-brief-personal-tcp-story&quot;&gt;My brief personal TCP story&lt;/h1&gt;