Tarides Blog

Absolutely, MirageOS is indeed pivotal in the development of unikernels. MirageOS not only developed the unikernel concept but also coined the term 'unikernel'.

MirageOS represents a significant shift in cloud and network computing, focusing on building highly specialized, secure, and efficient unikernels that streamline application deployment by shedding unnecessary components. It also puts extra focus on security, with most of the stack — including TCP and TLS — being rewritten in a type-safe language (OCaml).

Currently, MirageOS is expanding to include bare-metal and embedded systems, aiming to bring the same level of security and efficiency to this domain. The move towards embedded systems is a natural progression for MirageOS, given our emphasis on minimalism and security in environments where resources are limited and reliability is crucial. See for instance what is happening with SpaceOS: https://tarides.com/blog/2023-07-31-ocaml-in-space-welcome-spaceos/

This all started because we wanted to _get away_ from the need to fork or run multiple processes, since that's so hard in a variety of hardware architectures (like mobile or embedded).

Other researchers also share the dislike of fork...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf

A 2010 paper where I sketched out some of the early ideas around "multiscale" is here: https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-bcs-visions.pdf

It took a little longer than I'd planned, but thanks to the hard work of so many MirageOS contributors, now's a pretty good time to glue back personal containers and self-hosted data management infrastructure again! Unikernel-based messaging has really come together in the past couple of years: https://tarides.com/blog/2022-03-08-secure-virtual-messages-in-a-bottle-with-scop

No idea if any others are closer to that ideal, but MirageOS unikernel (OCaml) offers nods in that direction:

"Possible to formally verify critical components" https://www.cs.williams.edu/~cs432/osco/01-whit.pdf

"As part of our mission to build robust and secure systems, we strive to support technology that roots its design in the field of formal methods" has a TCP stack manually derived from a formal model https://tarides.com/blog/2024-01-24-mirageos-designing-a-more-resilient-networking-stack-with-tcp/

For nested parallel computations (think Scientific Programming, where one would use OpenMP, Rust Rayon, etc), we have domainslib [1]. Eio, a direct-style, effect-based IO library is pretty competitive against Rust Tokio [2]. The performance will only get better as we get closer to the 5.0 release.

[1] https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/domainslib

[2] See the http server performance graphs at https://tarides.com/blog/2022-03-01-segfault-systems-joins-tarides#ecosystem