esy-mirage-skeleton

NOTE: This is a fork that just puts some Esy on top. All the work is thanks to the Mirage people!

This repository is a collection of tutorial code referred to from the Mirage website, example code for using specific devices like filesystems and networks, and higher-level applications like DHCP, DNS, and Web servers.

• tutorial/ contains the tutorial content.
• device-usage/ contains examples showing specific devices.
• applications/ contains the higher-level examples, which may use several different devices.

Prerequisites

• Install latest Esy (at least 1.2.2), following instructions at https://esy.sh/

• Install esy sandbox and enter an esy shell:

    $ esy install
    $ esy shell

• Please ensure that your Mirage command-line version is at least 3.0.0 before proceeding:

    $ mirage --version
    3.0.5

Trivial example

You can check that your build environment is working and get a feel for the normal workflow by trying to compile the noop application.

    $ cd tutorials/noop
    $ mirage configure -t unix # initial setup for UNIX backend
    $ make # build the program
    $ ./noop # run the program

Note that in the general case, you may need to specify more options at the mirage configure stage. You can find out about them with mirage configure --help. For example, you may need to specify what networking method should be used, with, e.g., --net socket or --net direct at the mirage configure stage.

Configure, Build, Run

Each unikernel lives in its own directory, and can be configured, built, and run from that location. For example:

    $ cd applications/static_website_tls
    $ mirage configure -t unix # initial setup for UNIX backend
    $ make # build the program
    $ ./https # run the program

If you want to clean up mirage's artifacts after building, mirage clean will do the trick:

    $ cd applications/static_website_tls
    $ mirage clean

There is also a top-level Makefile at the root of this repository with convenience functions for configuring, building, and running all of the examples in one step.

    $ make all                   ## equivalent to ...
    $ make configure build
    $ make clean

Details

The Makefile simply invokes sample-specific sample/Makefile. Each of those invokes the mirage command-line tool to configure, build and run the sample, passing flags and environment as directed. The mirage command-line tool assumes that the OPAM package manager is present and is used to manage installation of an OCaml dependencies.

The mirage command-line tool supports four commands, each of which either uses config.ml in the current directory or supports passing a config.ml directly.

To configure a unikernel before building:

    $ mirage configure -t [hvt|virtio|qubes|macosx|unix|xen]

The boot target is selected via the -t flag. The default target is unix. Depending on what devices are present in config.ml, there may be additional configuration options for the unikernel. To list the options,

Note: the option hvt needs mirage ≥ 3.2.0 - which you can get via opam 2

    $ mirage help configure

and see the section labeled UNIKERNEL PARAMETERS.

To install dependencies

To install dependencies you need to use esy add on the top level of the repository.

To build a unikernel:

    $ make

The output will be created next to the config.ml file used.

To run a unikernel:

The mechanics of running the generated artifact will be dependent on the backend used. For details, see solo5's readme for Ukvm and Virtio, the qubes-test-mirage repository's readme for Qubes, or the MirageOS website instructions on booting Xen unikernels.

For the Macosx and Unix backends, running as a normal process should suffice.

For summaries by backend that assume the hello example, see below:

Unix:

    $ cd hello
    $ mirage configure -t unix
    $ make
    $ ./hello

Xen:

    $ cd hello
    $ mirage configure -t xen
    $ make
    $ sudo xl create xen.xl -c

Ukvm:

    $ cd hello
    $ mirage configure -t hvt
    $ make
    $ ./solo5-hvt hello.hvt

Virtio:

    $ cd hello
    $ mirage configure -t virtio
    $ make
    $ solo5-virtio-run ./https.virtio

Macosx:

    $ cd hello
    $ mirage configure -t macosx
    $ make
    $ ./hello

Qubes:

Some specific setup in the QubesOS manager is necessary to be able to easily run MirageOS unikernels -- please see the qubes-test-mirage readme for details.

    $ cd hello
    $ mirage configure -t qubes
    $ make
    $ ~/test-unikernel hello.xen unikernel-test-vm

To clean up after building a unikernel:

    $ make clean