Mirage OS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms. Code can be developed on a normal OS such as Linux or MacOS X, and then compiled into a fully-standalone, specialised unikernel that runs under the Xen hypervisor.
Since Xen powers most public cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon EC2 or Rackspace, this lets your servers run more cheaply, securely and with finer control than with a full software stack.
Mirage uses the OCaml language, with libraries that provide networking, storage and concurrency support that work under Unix during development, but become operating system drivers when being compiled for production deployment. The framework is fully event-driven, with no support for preemptive threading.
This contains the OS bindings for the Mirage operating system, primarily
through an OS OCaml module. The following backends are available:
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Unix: maps POSIX resources and executes Mirage apps as normal binaries.
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Xen: a microkernel backend that can run against Xen3+
For documentation, visit http://openmirage.org.
The older "unified" tree is also present for historical reasons into the
old-master branch.
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xen-posix/contains the header files to pretend a posix system (required to compile the OCaml runtime), plus minilibc and float formating -- this is the home for themirage-xen-posixOPAM package. Installation goes into.opam/x/lib/mirage-xen-posixand.opam/x/include/mirage-xen-posix -
xen-ocaml/contains only the OCaml runtime (patches and build system), installation into.opam/x/lib/mirage-xen-ocamland.opam/x/include/mirage-xen-ocaml -
bindings/andxen/subdirectories form themirage-xenOPAM package -- this consists of various bindings and the OCaml OS module (in xen/).