Re: [Minios-devel] [MirageOS-devel] [Xen-API] [RFC] Unicore Subproject Proposal

[Simon Kuenzer <simon.kuenzer@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Samuel,

On 14.09.2017 16:47, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Anil Madhavapeddy, on jeu. 14 sept. 2017 15:38:54 +0100, wrote:
> > On 13 Sep 2017, at 17:13, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Anil Madhavapeddy, on mer. 13 sept. 2017 11:11:03 +0100, wrote:
> > > > Maintaining a forked MiniOS has been a multi-year source of a maintenance 
> > > > burden for MirageOS,
> > > I'm just wondering why this happened?
> > >
> > > The mini-os repository is open for development, it's just a matter of
> > > agreeing on how to implement features :)
> > We forked it well before mini-os spun out into a separate repository,
> > around 5 years ago.
We did the same for our ClickOS, MiniCache and Minipython Unikernel: We 
used our own fork of MiniOS (4-5 years ago). However, while working on 
it, we noticed that there is much more to do than just introducing some 
switches and add new features.
We add several functionality to our MiniOS tree (replaced network I/O, 
TSO feature, persistent grants for block, select/poll support, proper 
heap memory allocation, hooks into low-level code), but support for more 
hypervisor stayed forever on our wishlist. We concluded that you should 
either intrusively clean-up and reorganize the Mini-OS code (which we 
think is non-trivial to do) or you start with a new project and port the 
pieces from MiniOS that you need (which is clearly lots of work, too).
We decided for the latter because it also forces us to rethink about 
internal APIs and code organization. A proper design should also 
simplify adding support for more hypervisors. And because we understand 
the needs of Unikernels better today ;-), I think we should consider 
this as a rare chance and should make use of it.
> Ok :)
>
> > It's a combination of both I think.  I had a very quick look at the latest 
> > mini-os
> > tree and ran into build problems from the master branch
> Ok, so it's just a matter of cleanly working on it.
>
> Samuel
Thanks,

Simon

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