Galois releases the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine (HaLVM)

dons · on Nov 30, 2010

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

We're under very heavy load now.

SkyMarshal · on Nov 30, 2010

"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'?

plesn · on Nov 30, 2010

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

ezyang · on Dec 1, 2010

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.

plesn · on Dec 1, 2010

For the server itself or for permanant storage ?

narrator · on Dec 1, 2010

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.

lallysingh · on Dec 1, 2010

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.

chc · on Nov 30, 2010

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&#...

ljlolel · on Dec 1, 2010

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

eru · on Dec 1, 2010

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

sanxiyn · on Dec 1, 2010

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

wmf · on Dec 1, 2010

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?

blasdel · on Dec 1, 2010

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

avsm · on Dec 1, 2010

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...

vegai · on Dec 1, 2010

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

dons · on Dec 1, 2010

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.