Mirage: A New Multi-Scale Operating System for Clouds and Crowds
Anil Madhavapeddy (University of Cambridge)
Friday, October 22, 2010

ABSTRACT

Applications run on all kinds of environments these days: multicore desktops, virtual cloud infrastructures, smart-phones, and web browsers. These diverse environments make it worth rethinking the long-term future of our software stacks; do we really want to continue bundling gigabytes of general-purpose OS software with every single cloud image? Is there any point holding onto decades-old interfaces such as POSIX any more?

I will introduce Mirage, a new operating system built in the statically type-safe OCaml functional language. Mirage compiles high-level functional source code directly into a variety of targets such as:
(i) small microkernels that run directly on the “bare-metal” Xen hypervisor;
(ii) Javascript for web browsers; or
(iii) embedded ARM devices;
and of course normal operating systems such as Linux.

Mirage provides a consistent, simple programming API across all of these diverse backends, which makes it a powerful foundation for constructing safe, complex distributed systems across a heterogeneous set of modern compute resources such as mobile devices or cloud computing infrastructure. Also, it’s just plain fun programming in OCaml.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge based in the Systems Research Group, investigating programming models for cloud computing. Dr. Madhavapeddy was on the original team at Cambridge that developed the Xen hypervisor, and subsequently served as the senior architect and product director for XenSource/Citrix before returning to academia.

Prior to obtaining his PhD in 2006 from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Madhavapeddy had a diverse background in industry at Network Appliance, NASA, and Internet Vision. In addition to professional and academic activities, Dr. Madhavapeddy is an active member of the open source development community with the OpenBSD operating system, a member of the steering committee for Commercial Uses of Functional Programming, and on the boards of startup companies such as Limbe Labs and Ashima Arts.

View full post on SNA Projects Blog

Read more on Slashdot

Read more on InfoWorld

Consider a practical scenario, where you encounter the below error message when you attempt to boot your system:

“Uncompressing Linux:…Ok booting kernel

audit(xxx.x….x..:0) : initialized

EXT3-fs error (device hda3):ext3_check_descriptors:Block bitmap for grade 38 not int grade ( block 34799616)

EXt3-fs:roup descriptors corrupted.

Mount: error 22 mounting ext3

pivot root ivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2

unmount/initrd/proc_failed:2

kernel panic: No init found: Try passing init=0 to kernel”

You encounter the same error message each time you attempt to boot your system. As a result of the above error, all your critical data becomes inaccessible.

Cause:

The above error message is encountered when group descriptors are corrupted.

Resolution:

To resolve the above issue and access the data, you need to use FSCK command. This command is mainly used to repair the EXT3 file system. But, if the file system has been badly corrupted, then this command fails to repair. In such circumstances, you need to recreate the file system again by formatting and reinstalling Linux. A clean reinstall of Linux will completely erase all data from the selected Linux volume. For complete and orderly recovery of data after reinstalling Linux, you will need to se powerful Linux Recovery software.

These Linux Data Recovery applications ensure comprehensive scanning of formatted Linux volumes by using powerful scanning algorithms. These recovery tools can recover and restore data after problems like group descriptors faults, Inode table damage and superblock corruption. They are built with highly graphical and interactive user interface that makes them easily understandable without prior technical skills.

Stellar Phoenix  Linux Data Recovery is the most efficient and trust worthy Linux Recovery tool. It supports Ext2, Ext3 and ReiserFS file systems based Linux volumes. This read only Data Recovery Linux application gets installed on Windows (Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000) and the affected Linux drive should be connected as slave.

Are you unable to boot your computer from Linux operating system in a dual-boot configuration with Windows? Your system cannot recognize the Linux partition and you cannot access your data from the system? This behavior renders your Linux partition inaccessible and your valuable data irretrievable. Such problems may occur due to missing or corrupt hard drive data structures. It leads to significant data loss, if your backup is not updated. In order to recover lost data in these cases, linux data recovery comes for your rescue.

In a practical scenario, you may come across the below error message after you install Windows XP on a computer that has Linux Ubuntu already installed:

“root (hd1,1) Ubuntu/disks
Error 22: No such partition”

This problem occurs when you make your system dual-boot. After the above error message, boot process fails and you cannot gain access of your Linux partition. To get your valuable data back, you need to identify the root of this problem and perform data recovery linux by resolving it.

Grounds of the issue

You may encounter this problem due to corruption to the Linux partition or file system. Linux cannot read a damaged partition and access boot files from it.

A computer hard drive is divided into several partitions, which work as individual drives. You can use different file systems and can install different operating systems on these partitions as per your requirement. The hard drive partitioning is particularly useful for effective management of your precious data.

The hard drive partition and file system may get damaged due several reasons, such as virus infection, improper system shutdown, power outages, user mistakes, file system conflicts, and more.

Resolution

Try out the below methods to sort out this problem:

Boot your system from boot disk of Ubuntu operating system.

Run fsck tool to check integrity and consistency of your hard drive partition.

Format your Linux partition and reinstall the operating system.

Formatting can fix this problem, but it also removes all the data from your Linux partition and cause severe data loss. In such cases, Linux Recovery is the only way to go.

The Linux Data Recovery software enables easy and absolute recovery of all your lost data with advanced scanning techniques and simple graphical user interface.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is the most powerful utility that provides assured recovery of all your mission-critical data. The software supports all major distributions of Linux operating system, such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, and Debian. It is a read-only application that safely recovers data from Ext4, Ext3, Ext2, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 file system volumes.

Read more on TechRepublic

Read more on Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance