Last year the open source Xen Project was transferred to the Linux Foundation, and soon after the community announced the first release version of the operating system Mirage OS. The initiative was started in 2009 under the joint collaboration of Cambridge University students and professionals from Citrix Systems, Inc.

Mirage OS is a unikernel for constructing secure, cost-effective and high-performance network applications that run across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms.

How it works

Most applications running in the cloud are not optimized to do so. They inherently carry assumptions about the underlying operating system, which results in larger footprints with increased costs and risks. Mirage OS represents a new approach where only the necessary components of the operating system are included and compiled along with the application code into a unikernel, or single-purpose appliance.

Building an application with MirageOS begins with the creation of a dependency graph to identify the necessary resources. Indeed, a classic VM features a full operating system, a web server, a database management system and management system windows, which each read configuration files at startup to initialize while only a small part of their duties will be used by the deployed application.

The purpose of a unikernel in MirageOS is to prune these processes to load and configure the useful functions. This is why the configuration files are included from the outset in the dependency graph, and loaded when compiling the application. It is the same useful parts of the kernel, available in the form of libraries in the warehouse source code OCaml.

The company says these microkernels run directly on Xen Project hypervisor API. Since the Xen Project powers most public clouds such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and many others, Mirage lets your servers run more cheaply, securely and faster in any Xen Project based cloud or hosting service.

Why use Mirage OS

The Mirage OS approach is likely to appeal most to creators of infrastructure software such as web servers, DNS servers and software defined networking (SDN). University of Cambridge contributor Anil Madhavapeddy said that Mirage can be used to rapidly build specialized infrastructure applications using modern, modular programming techniques such as those found in OCaml. Mirage OS is also useful to provide a smaller and more secure ‘domain 0’, the special domain used for the management of a hypervisor.

Example use cases for Mirage OS include hosting a high-performance website appliance running directly on the Xen Project hypervisor instead of a full operating system, or enabling administrators to simply and securely deploy network traffic monitors or isolated virtual switches into lightweight virtual machines. Another example might be a content management system like WordPress or Joomla to create a website, or a CRM for customer management of a company.

Mirage OS will run on x86 and ARM systems and users can deploy projects to any of the leading cloud platforms running the Xen Project hypervisor.

Support from industry leaders

The Xen Project released version 1.0 of the Mirage Operating System in December last year. At the time, Amazon Web Services, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), Bromium Inc., Calxeda Inc., CA Technologies (CA, Inc.), Cisco Systems, Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Verizon Communications Inc. have decided to support Xen in its new haven.

The project contributors say Xen Project aims to support a brave new world of dust clouds: tiny one-shot VMs that run on hypervisors with far greater density than is currently possible and that self-scale their resource needs by constantly calling into the cloud fabric.

You can get started by following the install instructions to create your own webserver to host a static website. Also check out the release notes and download page.

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