---
title: Robust Open Bare-metal Ubiquitous Resilient
author: someone
---
At robur, we build performant bespoke minimal operating systems for high-assurance services.

Advantages
* based on the unikernel pioneer [MirageOS](https://mirage.io)
* secure implementation guarded against memory corruption, typelevel problems, leaky abstraction and unforseen state
* ready for the cloud, services run on all major hypervisors
* instant boot
* competitive performance comparable to C / C++
* can target embedded devices because of small size and the ability to compile to native code
* minimized state allows to reason about entire systems and their adherence to the specification
* extensive library ecosystem, yet minimal trusted code base at runtime

from scratch with security in mind, directly on the virtualization layer.  
Each service is a separate virtual machine image with exactly the
required code, and no need for a multi-purpose operating system kernel.

This makes our systems much smaller.  The binary size of an HTTP server with TLS
support in our system is around 4% compared to one in a conventional operating
system, making the attack surface much smaller.

Additionally, we use a safe programming language: a statically and strongly
typed functional programming language with automated memory management.  This
reduces the attack vectors: temporal and spatial memory corruption are no
concern anymore.  The declarative programming style makes it possible to
formally verify the correctness of the entire virtual machine with a theorem
prover.

One of our single purpose operating systems boots within milliseconds, and has a
tiny memory footprint.  For client-side features that run in a webbrowser, we
compile to JavaScript from the same codebase, to ensure consistency. The strong
and static type system helps to detect errors early, and enables rapid
prototyping.  For production use the prototype code can be further optimized for
performance.

## Conclusion

MirageOS started as a research project, and has matured to a full suite for
building secure operating systems, with libraries that work well in production
and cover a variety of application needs.  MirageOS is a game changer for secure
network services, since the attack surface is minimised to 1% of the size of
other contemporary operating systems. In addition, common attack vectors are
avoided by the usage of a programming language with memory safety.  A unikernel
boots within tens of milliseconds, and services can be spawned on demand. When a
request (e.g. a DNS request) for a unikernel comes in, the kernel boots up,
handles the request, and is destroyed after an inactivity period. Only the
necessary services need to run, and they can be short-lived to minimize state in
the system.

The choice of a high-level programming language also allows for rapid
prototyping, new features can be developed quickly.  In contrast to scripting
languages, the code does not need to be re-implemented for production use (but
nevertheless can be fine-tuned for performance).


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