Galois releases the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine (HaLVM) | Hacker News Reader

Galois releases the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine (HaLVM)

galois.com

96 pointsdons16 comments

Mirror: http://corp.galois.com/blog/2010/11/30/galois-releases-the-h...

We're under very heavy load now.

"Finally, we’d like to give many things to the GHC and Xen communities, without which this work would not be possible."

Just an fyi, slight typo there. Probably mean 'thanks' instead of 'things'?

Is it possible to run a web server like, say, Snap, directly on top of it ?

That certainly strikes me as a good idea, although one difficulty is that there needs to be filesystem support first, which as far as I can tell there is not at the moment.

For the server itself or for permanant storage ?

I looked at the source. Apparently they are writing NE2000 drivers in Haskell. It appears that this is more of a platform for writing an OS in Haskell with the help of Xen and not really for web apps.

Presumably the webapps could come in after there's a normal socket interface (which could also be written in Haskell, atop of a Haskell TCP stack, atop of the NE2k drivers).

I'm curious to see what Galois has done with it so far.

Looks like Galois' blog has already buckled under the influx of traffic, so here's the Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...

Very cool. Might it one day be possible to run pure haskell on Xen on AWS?

Somebody already did it with OCaml, so Haskell shouldn't be too far off.

FYI: OCaml on Xen: http://www.openmirage.org/

It should be possible now if HaLVM has proper PV drivers; AWS allows custom kernels and what do they care what language your kernel is written in?

Is AWS allowing custom kernels for users that are neither paid AMI partners nor big prominent customers?

Yes. Here's the little script that wraps up Mirage kernels into EC2 AMIs.

https://github.com/avsm/mirage/blob/master/scripts/ec2.sh

Unfortunately, I can't figure out the AWS magic to build EBS images directly, which means that you can't use the free m1.micro instances with this script. Help from anyone who knows welcome...

Is there a measurable benefit compared to having the OS stack there? I suppose none of the POSIX stuff are there, right?

Amongst other things, you can run hundreds of halvm nodes on a typical machine; and the "OS" boots in a fraction of the time it takes to boot a kernel.

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