Tracking issues for blog posts/articles to accompany the MirageOS 4 release

[samoht]

Similar to to #513 but for MirageOS 4. I am opening this issue to organize our communication around the upcoming release.

Here is the current plan (days are tentative):

• Day 1:
  • Linux Foundation press release
  • Mirage 4.0 release announcement (we want to dedicate the release to Lars)
• Day 3
  • "Email in OCaml" (Draft) @dinosaure
• Day5
  • "Introduction to Build Concepts in MirageOS 4.0" (Draft) @TheLortex
• Day 7
  • "OS as a Development Journey" (Draft) (Pierre)
• Day 9
  • post on VPNKit (pointing to the the Docker blog post (@djs55)
• Day 11
  • summary post on Robur's unikernels (just a recap of the unikernel section in an old post + the new DAPSI unikernels? (@hannesm + @dinosaure )

[hannesm]

The issue with "something about reproducible builds" is that for MirageOS 3.x we have everything in place (https://hannes.robur.coop/Posts/Deploy https://builds.robur.coop) -- while the story for MirageOS 4 is not yet clear (I discussed with @dinosaure to go more in depth in Mirleft in November with @TheLortex and @dinosaure).

[samoht]

Ok no pb! Anything else you would be interested to write for the release? Maybe a summary of the nice unikernel apps that you've been developing at Robur (like OpenVPN?)? (or something about DNS which might be timely given the recent Slack and FB outages? :p)

[dinosaure]

I think it should be a good place to talk about mirage-crypto too:

• the incredible work from @hannesm about its integration of fiat into mirage-crypto
• our work on eqaf
• and the story behind mirage-crypto generally which is a big package in our ecosystem

Then, I agree with @samoht to talk about ocaml-dns since we started to deeply use it (if only for our domain name).

Finally, it can be an opportunity to talk more precisely about albatross & ocurrent indeed (and explain that the story to deploy a MirageOS is more easier than before).

[dinosaure]

Ah and may be we missed it but I think it improved a lot our ecosystem but we should talk about ocaml-ci (@avsm, @talex5) as our default CI for any of our MirageOS projects. It solves many issues and specially big-endian support and 32-bits architecture support which, IMHO, is in the spirit of MirageOS projects where our software should work everywhere.

[dinosaure]

And (again), we should talk a bit about the IPv6 support too I think (@MagnusS & @hannesm?).

[samoht]

We should aim to at most 4 or 5 blog posts - it's fine for these to be quite short, and point to existing materials. The goals of these posts are to showcase existing work, give context and explain how they contribute to the MirageOS 4.0 release. So we can probably merge a few things together if that's easier.

For design overviews/architecture documents, it's better to create a separate entry in the wiki/tutorial guides (that we can keep up-to-date in the future) and refer to them in the overview blog posts.

[hannesm]

talk a bit about the IPv6 support

This is already announced in https://mirage.io/blog/announcing-mirage-310-release

[hannesm]

OpenVPN

sure, although there's some gap of it still not released to opam

DNS

there are some points to DNS (none of which are really related to MirageOS 4) that are still under development:

• DNS client using multiple nameservers (just merged that PR) via happy-eyeballs
• DNS-over-TLS (WIP DNS-over-TLS (7858) for the dns-client: With_tls functor ocaml-dns#267)
• DNSSec (not done yet, see DNSSec support ocaml-dns#236 DNSSec (RFC 4034 et al) support ocaml-dns#251)
• IPv6 support in the resolver & server (not quite done, see DNS resolver should use AAAA (IPv6) entries of authoritative name servers ocaml-dns#262 DNS server IPv6 support ocaml-dns#253)

TL;DR: I'd wait until we've a DNS release and then announce the features implemented. Indeed, a DNS resolver that validates DNSSec is still high on my priority list.

[hannesm]

mirage-crypto (and EC)

See https://hannes.robur.coop/Posts/EC for my writeup in that respect. Feel free to link to that blog post as well ;)

Note: I'm happy to write a blog post, but atm I'm not entirely sure what about. Eventually the builds.robur and albatross integration -- but then this will have to wait until builds.robur uses MirageOS4. Eventually deployment with albatross + DHCP + binary builds, but this needs to wait until that prototype is done.

[hannesm]

For inspiration, the draft release roadmap mirage/mirage#994 (with focusing the 4.0 release on the tooling only (e.g. mirage4 = mirage+dune).) -- eventually the announcement should wait until we have some more nice unikernels (see above, dns resolver should be one of them -- what is the state of a mail server / matrix server? tlstunnel and unipi may be other nice unikernels to use in practise).

EDIT: certainly openvpn as well, see https://mirage.io/wiki/gallery :)

[hannesm]

Eventually the CA https://github.com/paurkedal/ephca is also a nice use case, and the sshfs https://github.com/palainp/mirage-sshfs (I have tested neither of them and am not sure how early-development they are).

[dinosaure]

what is the state of a mail server

Currently, we are able to send an email with DKIM/SPF mechanism and a service such as Google can receive emails and does not throw them as a spam. I can share in private some outcomes about the current status of such stack if you want.

[dinosaure]

@TheLortex and me probably want to write down something about gilbraltar when we discover many interesting things (the complexity of a bare-metal Operating System according our cross-compilation workflow, the signal system and so on). WDYT?

[samoht]

We already have quite a bit of content so no urgency but that's definitely super interesting to write (and read) more about this :-)

[hannesm]

Thanks for the organisation and the release to everyone, especially @samoht @dinosaure @christinerose @TheLortex. I suspect this issue is done and will close it. If there's something left, please reopen. :)

[christinerose]

You're welcome, @hannesm! It was my pleasure to work with this team. 😀

[samoht]

Many thanks to everyone involved, we managed to publish great content for 2 weeks without missing any slot! 🎉 And many many thanks to @christinerose to coordinate all of this :-)