Weekly Meeting: 2014-09-16

Agenda

Mirage 2.0 libs
- cohttp point release
- other library releases
OCaml 4.02.0: adding support
Reminder: Xen doc day on the 24th!
Xen/ARM development environment

Attendees: Marlon Brasil, Marco Cesare, Amir Chaudhry (chair), Thomas Gazagnaire, David John, Vicky Khan, Jon Ludlam, Anil Madhavapeddy, Mindy Preston, Dave Scott and Magnus Skjegstad (with guest appearances from Wanda and Bella).

Notes

Mirage 2.0 libs

cohttp point release - cohttp has external users and there have been bug-fixes waiting for months. Ideally, would like to cut a release based on master but can't do that without also doing all of the Mirage 2.0 and related libraries (e.g conduit). In order to support the current users, the plan is to roll back and do a point release (e.g 0.11.3 or 0.12.0) that includes these fixes so that others are unblocked.

Mirage 2.0 library releases

This is still primarily driven by conduit, which requires a set of simultaneous releases (tracked in mirage/mirage#287).

Once these releases are done, we should be able to remove the reliance on the Mirage opam remote. There are about 12 dev repos in there now and since they're working, it would be good to get them properly tagged and released. That would simply a lot of other work as we'd all have fewer things to pin and keep track of and we'd also have to refresh the tutorials. There was some discussion on V1 and V2, FLOWs and vchan, as well as the conventions we might want to follow for such interfaces going forward.

All of this should be written down and various aspects considered and discussed on the mailing list. The issue linked above should be updated and expanded (or a new one created) to keep track of things (including which instructions need updating).

Mindy has a cubieboard and can take a look at the ARM instructions again. So far, got it to boot using the images from blobs.openmirage.org. Once there are releases it would be good to get more eyes on this.

OCaml 4.02.0: adding support

OCaml 4.02.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and there are some useful features that Mirage might benefit from. We should consider when and how we add support for 4.02.0 but first we should ensure that we have proper support for 4.01.0!

There may even be issues with the current 4.02.0 release that may necessitate a 4.02.1. If that's the case, we may decide to not support 4.02.0 at all. We'll see how things stand in due course.

Xen Doc Day

There is an outstanding request to get more information up on the Xen.org wiki and it would be useful for us to refresh some of our material. We can do this during the Xen Doc Day (24th Sep). Amir may be able to spend some time on this in advance.

Xen/ARM dev setup

A question was posed on the list about development environment for Xen+ARM work (specifically Chromebooks, see the thread). This was raised during the call as this kind of set up may be a useful way of working. Apparently, it's actually quite difficult to work with these devices where Xen is concerned. The easiest way is still to use a cubieboard and work directly from there. We should expand xen-arm-builder to make it easier for people to get going.

AoB

Hannes is back from travels and will be working on TLS integration.
Would be good to remove Xenstore from mirage-platform. This might break things. It's the core coordination in Xen but doesn't work well with Unix. Although, Xenstore is now Xen independent, so maybe we should call it IrminStore instead?
Next call is scheduled for 30th September - Please refer to the mailing list for actual details a day or so in advance.