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blog/_posts/2015-02-06-fosdem-unikernel-demo.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Unikernel demo at FOSDEM"
+author: Amir Chaudhry
+date: 2015-02-06 18:10:00
+tags: [mirage, nymote, ocaml, unikernel]
+description:
+shorturl: http://nymote.org/blog/fosdem-unikernel-demo/
+---
+{% include JB/setup %}
+
+Last weekend was spent at one of the world's biggest open source conferences,
+FOSDEM.  You can check out [last year's review][fosdem2014] to get an idea of
+the scale of the event. Since there's no registration process, it's difficult
+to estimate how many people attend but given how many rooms there are, and how
+full they are, it's easily several thousand. I was impressed last year at how
+smoothly things went and the same was true this year.
+
+The main reason to attend this time was to run a demo of MirageOS from an ARM
+board — one of the main advances since the previous conference. I looked over
+all the things we'd achieved since last year and put together a demo that
+showcases some of the capabilities as well as being fun.
+
+### 2048 from a Unikernel on an ARM board
+
+The demo was to serve the 2048 game from a Unikernel running on a Cubieboard2
+with its own access point.  When people join the wifi network, they get
+served a static page and can begin playing the game immediately.  
+
+The components I needed for the demo were:
+
+- Code for the 2048 game — I was able to lift code from a
+[tutorial last year][2048], which [Daniel][], [Leo][], [Jeremy][] and
+[Thomas][] all contributed to. It was first run at [CUFP 2014][cufp14] then
+adapted and presented at [Functional Conf][fuconf-tut] in India (see the
+[IOCaml notebook][iocaml-book]).  Attendees wrote the code in OCaml, which was
+then compiled into pure JavaScript (via [js_of_ocaml][]). The result can be run
+completely in the browser and only involves serving two files.
+
+- Code for making a static website — Since the game is completely
+self-contained (one html file and one js file). I only need to convert a static
+website into a unikernel.  That's trivial and
+[many people have done it before][jekyll-unikernel].
+
+- A Cubieboard with a wifi access point — There are pre-built images on the
+[MirageOS website][blobs], which make part of this easy. However, getting the
+wifi access point up involves a few more steps.
+
+The first two pieces should be straightforward and indeed, I had a working
+unikernel serving the 2048 game within minutes (unix version on my laptop). 
+The additional factors around the ARM deployment is where things were a little
+more involved. Although this was technically straightforward to set up, it
+still took a while to get all the pieces together.  A more detailed
+description of the steps is in my [fosdemo repository][fosdemo] and in
+essence, it revolves around configuring the wifi access point and setting up a
+bridge (thanks to [Mindy][], [Magnus][] and [David][] for getting this
+working).
+
+Once this was all up and running, it was a simple matter to configure the
+board to boot the unikernel on startup, so that no manual intervention would
+be required to set things up at the booth.
+
+#### Running the demo
+<a href="https://twitter.com/amirmc/status/561525704161243137/"><img style="float:right; margin-left: 15px;" src="/images/fosdem15-tweet.png"></a>
+
+I gave the demo at the Xen booth and it went very well.  There was a small
+crowd throughout my time at the booth I'm convinced that the draw of a board
+with glowing LEDs should not be underestimated.  Many people we're happy to
+connect to the access point and download the game to their browser but there
+were two main things I learnt.
+
+Firstly, demos involving games will work if people actually *know* the game.
+This is obvious, but I'd assumed that most people had already played 2048 —
+especially the crowd I'd expect to meet at FOSDEM.  It turned out that around
+a third of people had no idea what to do when the game loaded onto their
+browser. They stared blankly at it and then blankly at me.  Of course, it was
+trivial to get them started and they were soon absorbed by it — but it still
+felt like some of the 'cool-factor' had been lost.
+
+The second thing was that I tried to explain too much to people in much too
+short a time.  This particular demo involved Xen unikernels, js_of_ocaml and a
+Cubieboard2 with a wifi access point.
+There's a surprisingly large amount of technology there, which
+is difficult explain to a complete newcomer within one or two minutes.  When
+it was obvious someone hadn't heard of unikernels, I focused on the approach
+of library operating systems and the benefits that Mirage brings. If a visitor
+was already familiar with the concept of unikernels, I could describe the rest
+of the demo in more detail.
+
+Everything else did go well and next time I'd like to have a demo like this
+running with [Jitsu][].  That way, I could configure it so that a unikernel
+would spin up, serve the static page and then spin down again. If we can
+figure out the timing, then providing stats in the page about the lifetime of
+that unikernel would also be great, but that's for another time.
+
+
+##### Sidenote: The beginnings of a 'personal cloud'
+
+One of the things we're keen to work towards is the idea of
+[personal clouds][nymote]. It's not a stretch to imagine that a Cubieboard2,
+running the appropriate software, could act as one particular node in a
+network of your own devices. In this instance it's just hosting a fun and
+simple game but more complex applications are also possible.
+
+
+### Huge range of sessions and talks
+
+Of course, there was lots more going on than just my demo and I had a great
+time attending the talks. Some in particular that stood out to me were those
+in the [open source design][osd] room, which was a new addition this year. It
+was great to learn that there are design people out there who would like to
+contribute to open source ([get in touch][amc], if that's you!). I also had a
+chance to meet (and thank!) Mike McQuaid in his [Homebrew talk][homebrew].
+FOSDEM is one of those great events where you can meet in person all those
+folks you've only interacted with online.
+
+Overall, it was a great trip and I thoroughly recommend it if you've never
+been before!
+
+[fosdem2014]: http://nymote.org/blog/2014/fosdem-summary/
+[2048]: https://github.com/ocamllabs/2048-tutorial/
+[cufp14]: http://cufp.org/2014/t7-leo-white-introduction-to-ocaml.html
+[iocaml-book]: http://gazagnaire.org/fuconf14/
+[js_of_ocaml]: http://ocsigen.org/js_of_ocaml/
+[fuconf-tut]: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/functional-conf-2014#workshop-52-info
+[jekyll-unikernel]: http://amirchaudhry.com/unikernels-for-everyone/
+[blobs]: http://blobs.openmirage.org
+[fosdemo]: https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo
+[Jitsu]: https://github.com/MagnusS/jitsu
+[nymote]: http://nymote.org
+[osd]: https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/open_source_design/
+[amc]: https://twitter.com/amirmc
+[homebrew]: https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/homebrew_the_good,_bad_and_ugly_of_osx_packaging/
+
+[Leo]: http://www.lpw25.net
+[Jeremy]: https://github.com/yallop
+[Daniel]: http://erratique.ch
+[Thomas]: http://gazagnaire.org
+[Mindy]: http://somerandomidiot.com
+[Magnus]: http://www.skjegstad.com
+[David]: https://github.com/pqwy
+