On behalf of the MirageOS team, I am delighted to announce the release of MirageOS 4.0.0! I’d like to send special thanks to @dinosaure and @Lortex who drove that release forward for multiple years.
Since the first release of 2013, MirageOS has made steady progress toward deploying self-managed internet infrastructure. The project’s initial aim was to self-host as many services as possible aimed at empowering internet users to securely deploy infrastructure to own their data and take back control of their privacy. MirageOS can securely deploy static website hosting with “Let’s Encrypt” certificate provisioning and a secure SMTPstack with security extensions. MirageOS can also deploy decentralised communication infrastructure like Matrix, OpenVPN servers, and TLS tunnels to ensure data privacy or DNS(SEC) servers for better authentication.
The protocol ecosystem now contains hundreds of libraries and services millions of daily users. Over these years, major commercial users have joined the projects. They rely on MirageOS libraries to keep their products secure. For instance, the MirageOS networking code powers Docker Desktop’s VPNKit, which serves the traffic of millions of containers daily. Citrix Hypervisor uses MirageOS to interact with Xen, the hypervisor that powers most of today’s public cloud. Nitrokey is developing a new hardware security module based on MirageOS. Robur develops a unikernel orchestration system for fleets of MirageOS unikernels. Tarides uses MirageOS to improve the Tezos blockchain, and Hyper uses MirageOS to build sensor analytics and an automation platform for sustainable agriculture.
In the coming weeks, our blog will feature in-depth technical content for the new features that MirageOS brings, as well as a tour of the existing community and commercial users of MirageOS. Please reach out if you’d like to tell us about your story.
Install MirageOS 4
The easiest way to install MirageOS 4 is by using the opam version 2.1 and ocaml>=4.12.1. Follow the installation guide for more details.
$ opam update
$ opam install 'mirage>4'
Note: if you upgrade from MirageOS 3 you will need to manually clean the previous generated files (or call mirage clean before upgrading). You would also want to read the full list of API changes. You can see unikernel examples in mirage/mirage-skeleton, roburio/unikernels or tarides/unikernels.
About MirageOS
MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance, low-energy footprint applications across various hypervisor and embedded platforms. It is available as an open-source project created and maintained by the MirageOS Core Team. A unikernel can be customised based on the target architecture by picking the relevant MirageOS libraries and compiling them into a standalone operating system, which contains strictly the functionality necessary for the target. This minimises the unikernel’s footprint, increasing the security of the deployed operating system.
The MirageOS architecture can be divided into operating system libraries, typed signatures, and a metaprogramming compiler. The operating system libraries implement various functionalities, ranging
from low-level network card drivers, to full reimplementations of the TLS protocol, as well as the Git protocol to store versioned data. A set of typed signatures ensures that the OS libraries are consistent and work well in conjunction with each other. Most importantly, MirageOS is also a metaprogramming compiler that can input OCaml source code along with its dependencies, and a deployment target description in order to generate an executable unikernel, i.e., a specialised binary artefact containing only the code needed to run on the target platform. Overall, MirageOS focuses on providing a small, well-defined, typed interface with the system components of the target architecture.
Read the full announcement on mirage.io’s blog.
