Xen Project Introduces New Mirage OS Release

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwired - Jul 22, 2014) - The Xen Project Collaborative Project hosted at the Linux Foundation today announced the release of Mirage OS v2.0, which includes the industry's first software framework that unifies cloud and embedded deployments behind a safe, secure programming language, allowing developers to seamlessly build systems that span both embedded devices and public cloud services. The latest release also includes support for distributed computation, networking and storage.

Most applications running in the cloud are not optimized to do so. They make assumptions about the underlying operating system, resulting in larger footprints with increased costs and risks. The open source Mirage OS represents a new approach where the application code is combined with the specific components of the operating system it needs into a single-purpose unikernel appliance. With Mirage OS, developers can create lean and efficient unikernels for secure, cost-effective and high-performance network applications. Mirage OS unikernels run directly on the Xen Project hypervisor, which allows them to be quickly deployed to many leading cloud platforms.

For the first time, application developers using Mirage OS can deploy their projects to embedded ARM-based devices, such as the Cubieboard2 board, as well as to public clouds like Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud and Verizon Cloud. With a particular focus on scalability, resilience and safety, Mirage OS is ideal for creating mission-critical systems and can easily span from embedded devices in homes and buildings to large cloud deployments. This milestone release opens up the coming wave of connected devices to application developers with a number of significant new libraries to provide support for disconnected operation, security and enhanced interoperability, including:

• Irmin distributed Git-like storage system: enables a fully distributed workflow, with support for disconnected operation, efficient merge operations and application-specific conflict resolution algorithms. Irmin offers a way to circulate and integrate data among remote workers, sensors or devices in different connectivity environments and can seamlessly sync all information, pairing well with mobile computing and the Internet of Things.
• OCaml-TLS: a clean-slate implementation of the transport layer security (TLS) protocol in pure OCaml for security sensitive applications. TLS, also known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is the Internet's most widely used security protocol. By re-building security-critical software in OCaml, Mirage OS obstructs bugs related to spatial and temporal memory safety, such as Heartbleed.
• ARM device support: allows Mirage OS applications to be deployed as guest VMs under the Xen Project on ARM hypervisor, making it possible to run on low-power embedded devices, home routers, and many of the low-cost single-board ARM computers now available.
• vchan protocol: natively supports faster and more efficient Xen inter-domain communication using shared memory, e.g. between two VMs residing in the same Xen host. This provides a higher level of security compared to network sockets since messages will never leave the host's shared memory.
• Ctypes library: provides enhanced interoperability with existing C code and Mirage OS components can be linked into existing C applications. Ctypes makes it easy to interact with non-OCaml code by generating C glue code and also can produce standalone native object files that can be embedded within other non-OCaml applications.