---
title: Operating systems
author: hannes
tags: overview, operating system, mirageos
abstract: Operating systems and MirageOS
---

## Remark about this site

Sorry to be late with this entry, but I had to fix some issues:

- this website is based on [Canopy](https://github.com/Engil/Canopy), the content is stored as markdown in a [git repository](https://github.com/hannesm/hannes.nqsb.io)
- it was running in a [FreeBSD](https://FreeBSD.org) jail, but when I compiled too much the underlying [zfs file system](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/zfs.html) wasn't happy (and is now hanging in kernel space in a read)
- no remote power switch (borrowed to a friend 3 weeks ago), nobody was willing to go to the data centre and reboot
- I wanted to move it anyways to a host where I can deploy [Xen](http://www.xenproject.org/) guest VMs
- turns out the Xen compilation and deployment mode needed some love:
   - I ported a newer [bin_prot](https://github.com/hannesm/bin_prot/tree/113.33.00+xen) to xen
   - I wrote a clean patch to [serve via TLS](https://github.com/Engil/Canopy/pull/15) (including [HSTS header](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security) and redirecting HTTP (moved permanently) to HTTPS)
   - I found a memory leak in the [mirage-http](https://github.com/mirage/mirage-http/pull/23) library
- I was travelling
- good news: it now works on Xen, and there is [an atom feed](https://hannes.nqsb.io/atom)
- life of an "eat your own dogfood" full stack engineer ;)

## What is an operating system?

Wikipedia says: "An operating system (OS) is system software that manages
computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for
computer programs."  Great.  In other terms, it is an abstraction layer.
Applications don't need to deal with the low-level bits (device drivers) of the
computer.

But if we look at the landscape of deployed operating systems, there is a lot
more going on than abstracting devices: usually this includes process management (scheduler),
memory management (virtual memory), [C
library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_standard_library), user management
(including access control), persistent storage (file system), network stack,
etc. all being part of the kernel, and executed in kernel space.  A
counterexample is [Minix](http://www.minix3.org/), which consists of a tiny
microkernel, and executes the above mentioned services as user-space processes.

We are (or at least I am) interested in robust systems.  Development is done
by humans, thus will always be error-prone.  Even a proof of its functional
correctness can be flawed if the proof system is inconsistent or the
specification is wrong.  We need to have damage control in place by striving
for the [principle of least authority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege).
The goods to guard is the user data (passwords, personal information, private
mails, ...), which lives in memory.

A CPU contains [protection rings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_ring),
where the kernel runs in ring 0 and thus has full access to the hardware,
including memory.  A flaw in the kernel is devastating for the security of the
entire system, it is part of the [trusted computing base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing_base)).
Every byte of kernel code should be carefully developed and audited.  If we
can contain code into areas with less authority, we should do so.  Obviously,
the mechanism to contain code needs to be carefully audited as well, since
it will likely need to run in privileged mode.

In a virtualised world, we have on top of the kernel a
[hypervisor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor), which runs in ring -1.
The hypervisor gives access to memory and hardware to virtual machines,
schedules those virtual machines on processors, and should isolate the virtual
machines from each other.

![there's no cloud, just other people's computers](https://fsfe.org/contribute/promopics/thereisnocloud-v2-preview.png)

This ominous "cloud" uses hypervisors on huge amount of physical machines, and
executes off-the-shelf operating systems as virtual machines on top.  Accounting
is done by resource usage (time, bandwidth, storage).

## From scratch

Ok, now we have hypervisors which already deals with memory and scheduling.  Why
should we have the very same functionality again in the (general purpose) operating
system running as virtual machine?

Additionally, earlier in my life (back in 2005 at the Dutch hacker camp "What
the hack") I proposed (together with Andreas Bogk) to [phase out UNIX before
2038-01-19](https://berlin.ccc.de/~hannes/wth.pdf) (this is when `time_t`
overflows, unless promoted to 64 bit), and replace it with Dylan.  A [random
comment](http://www.citizen428.net/blog/2005/08/03/what-the-hack-recap/) about
our talk on the Internet is "the proposal that rewriting an entire OS in a
language with obscure syntax was somewhat original. However, I now somewhat feel
a strange urge to spend some time on Dylan, which is really weird..."

Being without funding back then, we didn't get far (hugest success was a
[TCP/IP](https://github.com/dylan-hackers/network-night-vision/) stack in
Dylan), and as mentioned earlier I went into formal methods and mechanised
proofs of full functional correctness properties.

At the end of 2013, David pointed me to
[MirageOS](https://mirage.io), an operating system developed from scratch in the
functional and statically typed language [OCaml](https://ocaml.org).  I've not
used much OCaml before, but some other functional programming languages.
Since then, I spend nearly every day on developing OCaml libraries (with varying success on being happy
with my code).  In contrast to Dylan, there are more than two people developing MirageOS.

The idea is straightforward: use a hypervisor, and its hardware
abstractions (virtualised input/output and network device), and execute the
OCaml runtime directly on it.  No C library included (since May 2015, see [this
thread](http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos-devel/2014-05/msg00070.html)).
This OCaml-based virtual machine runs in kernel space (this is bad, but
[this article](https://matildah.github.io/posts/2016-01-30-unikernel-security.html) shows
why it isn't too bad) for now, and
consists of the required libraries only.  This website is 16MB in size (and I didn't even bother to strip yet), which
includes the static CSS and JavaScript (bootstrap, jquery, fonts), [HTTP](https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-cohttp), [TLS](https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-tls) (also [X.509](https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-x509), [ASN.1](https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-asn1-combinators), [crypto](https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-nocrypto)), [git](https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-git/) (and [irmin](https://github.com/mirage/irmin)), [TCP/IP](https://github.com/mirage/mirage-tcpip) libraries.
The memory management in MirageOS is
straightforward: the hypervisor provides the OCaml runtime with a chunk of memory, which
immediately takes all of it.

This is much simpler to configure and deploy than a UNIX operating system:
There is no virtual memory, no process management, no file
system (the markdown content is held in memory with irmin!), no user management in the image.

At compile (configuration) time, the TLS keys are baked into the image, in addition to the url of the remote
git repository, the IPv4 address and ports the image should use:
The full command line for configuring this website is: `mirage configure --no-opam --xen -i Posts -n "full stack engineer" -r https://github.com/hannesm/hannes.nqsb.io.git --dhcp false --net direct --ip 198.167.222.205 --netmask 255.255.255.0 --gateways 198.167.222.1 --tls 443 --port 80`.
It relies on the fact that the TLS certificate chain and private key are in the `tls/` subdirectory, which is transformed to code and included in the image (using [crunch](https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-crunch)).   An improvement would be to [use an ELF section](https://github.com/mirage/mirage/issues/489), but there is no code yet.
After configuring and installing the required depedencies, a `make` builds the statically linked image.

Deployment is done via `xl create canopy.xl`.  The file `canopy.xl` is automatically generated by `mirage --configure` (but might need modifications).  It contains the full path to the image, the name of the bridge
interface, and how much memory the image can use:
```
name = 'canopy'
kernel = 'mir-canopy.xen'
builder = 'linux'
memory = 256
on_crash = 'preserve'
vif = [ 'bridge=br0' ]
```

To rephrase: instead of running on a multi-purpose operating system including processes, file system, etc., this website uses a
set of libraries, which are compiled and statically
linked into the virtual machine image.

MirageOS uses the module system of OCaml to define how interfaces should be, thus an
application developer does not need to care whether they are using the TCP/IP
stack written in OCaml, or the sockets API of a UNIX operating system.  This
also allows to compile and debug your library on UNIX using off-the-shelf tools
before deploying it as a virtual machine (NB: this is a lie, since there is code
which is only executed when running on Xen, and this code can be buggy) ;).

Most of the MirageOS ecosystem is developed under MIT/ISC/BSD license, which
allows everybody to use it for whichever project they want.

Did I mention that by using less code the attack vector shrinks?  In
addition to that, using a memory safe programming language, where the developer
does not need to care about memory management and bounds checks, immediately removes
several classes of security problems (namely spatial and temporal memory
issues), once the runtime is trusted.
The OCaml runtime was reviewed by the French [Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information](http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/agence/publication/lafosec-securite-et-langages-fonctionnels/) in 2013,
leading to some changes, such as separation of immutable strings (`String`) from mutable byte vectors (`Bytes`).

The attack surface is still big enough:  logical issues, resource management, and there is no access
control.  This is fine for this website, publishing of content is "protected" by relying on GitHub's
access control.

I hope I gave some insight into what the purpose of an operating systems is, and
how MirageOS fits into the picture. I'm interested in feedback, either via
[twitter](https://twitter.com/h4nnes) or as an issue on the [data repository on
GitHub](https://github.com/hannesm/hannes.nqsb.io/issues).