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<h3>Mirage: extreme specialisation of virtual appliances</h3>
+ <p>Infrastructure-as-a-Service compute clouds provide a flexible hardware platform on which
+ customers host applications as a set of appliances, e.g., web servers or databases. Each
+ appliance is a VM image containing an OS kernel and userspace processes, within which applications
+ access resources via traditional APIs such as POSIX. However, the flexibility provided by
+ the hypervisor comes at a cost: the addition of another layer in the already complex software
+ stack which impacts runtime performance, and increases the size of the trusted computing base.</p>
+ <p>Given that modern software is generally written in high-level languages that abstract the
+ underlying OS, we revisit how these appliances are constructed with our Mirage operating system.
+ Mirage supports the progressive specialisation of source code, and gradually replaces traditional
+ OS components with customisable libraries, ultimately resulting in "unikernel" VMs: sealed,
+ fixed-purpose VMs that run directly on the hypervisor.</p>
+ <p>Developers no longer need to become sysadmins, expert in the configuration of all manner
+ of system components, to use cloud resources. At the same time, they can develop their code
+ using their usual tools, only making the final push to the cloud once they are satisfied their
+ code works. As they explicitly link in components that would normally be provided by the host
+ OS, the resulting unikernels are also highly compact: facilities that are not used are simply
+ not included in the resulting microkernel binary.</p>
+ <p>This talk will describe the architecture of Mirage, and show a quick demonstration of how
+ to build a web-server that runs as a unikernel on a standard Xen installation.</p>
+
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<h3>Xen @ Google</h3>