Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the mysterious layers of your OS kernel? This tutorial will dispel such questions by walking you through the construction a web server operating system, written almost entirely in OCaml. We use the Xen hypervisor to supply virtual hardware that the guest will execute under, so that only a single set of virtual drivers are required for networking and storage (ideal for learning about how it all works).
The tutorial will last 3 hours and be highly interactive. We will:
After the initial tutorial, we plan to hang around and help with further questions, or even explore alternative microkernels such as HalVM (Haskell) or GuestVM (Java). Come along and learn the essential skills to learn how to build specialised services in your favourite programming language!
The tutorial will start gently, but participants should have some proficiency in OCaml.
Note: This is the same VM as for the T2: JaneStreet's OCaml Core Library.
You'll need:
Click Import Appliance from the File menu, and select the .ova file.
After it imports the file, click on CUFP Core and Mirage Tutorials,
and click the green Start arrow.
The user account is cufp, and the password is cufp2011. Log in,
and type /sbin/ifconfig to figure out what the internet address of
the virtual image is. It should be the one associated with eth1.
Then ssh to the box as cufp and log in. All the software you should
need is installed on the virtual machine.
You can also direct a web-browser at the virtual host. You'll find ocamldoc documentation for the Core libraries there.
If you prefer not to use VirtualBox, you can run most of the Mirage tutorial if you have the following software:
You can test that your setup works by cloning http://github.com/avsm/mirage and typing in 'make'. A final version of the source tree will be tagged the day before the tutorial, but the expectation is that you just pull the latest version before beginning.
is a Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge based in the Systems Research Group. Dr. Madhavapeddy was on the original team at Cambridge that developed the Xen hypervisor, and subsequently served as the senior architect and product director for XenSource/Citrix before returning to academia. Prior to obtaining his PhD in 2006 from the University of Cambridge, he had a diverse background in industry at Network Appliance, NASA, and Internet Vision. In addition to professional and academic activities, he is an active member of the open source development community with the OpenBSD operating system, a member of the steering committee for Commercial Uses of Functional Programming, and on the boards of startup companies such as Ashima Arts.
is a Horizon Transitional Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. His research currently centres on networked technologies within the Digital Economy. In addition to the topic of this talk this currently also includes exokernels for secure high-performance multiscale computing; and infrastructure to build an ecosystem around privacy preserving third-party access to personal data. His background is in systems and networking, covering operating systems, distributed systems, and local and wide-area networking. Prior to joining Nottingham he spent two years as founder at Vipadia Limited designing and building the Clackpoint and Karaka real-time communications products, six years as a researcher with Microsoft Research Cambridge, and seven months as a visitor at Sprint ATL, CA. He received a Ph.D. from the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and a B.A. in Mathematics, also from the University of Cambridge.
is the XenServer System Architect at Citrix, making virtualisation products based on the open source Xen hypervisor. Previously he was a consultant research scientist at Fraser Research, where he worked on their next-generation networking initiatives. In 2004 he finished a PhD in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, affiliated with the Cambridge Programming Research Group . He was also a co-founder of High Energy Magic, which produced mobile phone software to recognise printed visual symbols, known as SpotCodes.