[talex5]

This will be extremely useful for running on very small devices (not all ARM boards have the virtualisation extensions that are needed to run Mirage unikernels as Xen VMs).

But it also looks like lots of progress has been made with cross-compilation support in the OCaml compiler too. At the moment, I compile my Xen unikernels on my Cubieboard, but it would be quicker to cross-compile to ARM on my laptop and just push the final VM image.

[mwcampbell]

What small devices do you have in mind? True, the Raspberry Pi doesn't support virtualization, but in that case, you can run Mirage applications as normal Unix processes on Linux or FreeBSD, using raw sockets.

[talex5]

I was thinking about smaller devices than the Pi. Security devices, monitors, IoT type stuff. Especially where you want to minimise the amount of C code running and know exactly what it's doing.

I think it's also fun from a hobbiest point of view to do useful things without a traditional OS (Xen still requires Linux or similar in Dom0), but instead using a safe high-level language for most of it.