avsm

8 ms·

1.
by avsm 19d ago
OCaml (the language I use in the post) is an extremely memory safe language, but there are plenty of higher level logic issues that spring up. LLMs are extremely good at finding corner-case vulnerabilities in C bindings even within a memory
2.
Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days(anil.recoil.org)
399 points by avsm 20d ago|129 comments
3.
by avsm 2mo ago
Custom infrastructure; I use my site as a playground for various things over the years. It ran as the first MirageOS unikernel for many years, and recently it's been running on a zero-allocation OxCaml webserver https://anil
4.
by avsm 2mo ago
There's a full terminal implementation of Bonsai as well. I actually use it in my personal workflow these days to manage my contacts database! https://anil.recoil.org/notes/aoah-2025-9
5.
by avsm 2mo ago
Fun is, by far, the biggest reason I can identify why I work on some open source projects and not others these days! I think it was also true in the past, but to a lesser extent. Docker circa 2015 never felt like a job at all and the early
6.
by avsm 2mo ago
yep, I host two separate Tangled knots; one for my personal use and another for work at the Cambridge Computer Science department. Having large git repos on a server near me is great, and because I can sync the bare git repos it’s easy to r
7.
by avsm 3mo ago
I looked at this last year when it came out in Tahoe: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/apple-containerisation and this looks like more of the same. They've now added a WSL-style virtual machine layer, but there'
8.
by avsm 4mo ago
Nice work! Did you ever open any open source any of it? Looking at your OCaml wishlist from back in 2017, some stuff has improved and some is on its way: - Support for read-only BigArrays (or sections) : we're starting to switch to ju
9.
by avsm 4mo ago
I must confess to also using agents to do most of my OxCaml annotations: https://github.com/avsm/ocaml-claude-marketplace/tree/main/p... There's not that much downside since the annotations only cha
10.
by avsm 4mo ago
Do you have a link to your talk? I'm also curious if you did any GHG measurements, or it was part of the control stack. We wrote the XenServer stack in OCaml back in 2004, and that made it into orbit in 2017 (I think it did, anyway: h
11.
by avsm 4mo ago
Yeah; all the really dangerous extensions are gated behind flags. But there's still a very significant number of optimisations available by default that just work well. I've taken to compiling my normal OCaml code with OxCaml thes
12.
by avsm 4mo ago
The TL;DR here ( https://ccsds.org/Pubs/350x9g2.pdf ) seems to be "AES GCM", but with lots of lots of legacy protocols due to older birds in the sky. DTLS or HTTP3 would seem to be a better choice these days...
13.
by avsm 4mo ago
The big win here is having a GC by default, with the ability to reduce heap allocations (via stack) just by adding in more typing annotations. Switching to OxCaml with exclave_ stack_ annotations drops p99.9 latency from 29 ns to
14.
The Internet needs an antibotty immune system, stat(anil.recoil.org)
2 points by avsm 5mo ago|0 comments
15.
by avsm 5mo ago
The elephant in the room here is that there are hundreds of millions of embedded devices that cannot be upgraded easily and will be running vulnerable binaries essentially forever. This was a problem before of course, but the ease of chaini
16.
by avsm 6mo ago
> If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles Totally agree, I do the same as well on my site; e.g.: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tess
17.
by avsm 6mo ago
From another comment below, it's just a nice short title to convey that we're going back in time and not one to set your watch by. We first submitted the article to the CACM a while ago. The review process takes some tim
18.
by avsm 6mo ago
It's not as easy; a block device has to be bootable and so usually bundles a kernel (large). And because the filesystem inside is opaque, you can't do layering like Docker does easily via overlayfs and friends. libguestfs does a h
19.
by avsm 6mo ago
cool! What services have you shipped as unikernels? Docker doesn't have to be an alternative; it can help with the build/run pipeline for them too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkfXHBb-M4A (Dockercon 2015!)
20.
by avsm 6mo ago
> but omission from the article stands out. (article author here) Apple containers are basically the same as how Docker for Mac works; I wrote about it here: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/apple-containerisation Unf
21.
by avsm 6mo ago
> I don't think SLIRP was originally for palm pilots, given it was released two years before. That's a mistake indeed; "popularised by" might have been better. Before my beloved Palmpilot arrived one Christmas, I was
22.
by avsm 6mo ago
And those lightweight VM base images are possible because Docker applied a downward pressure on OS base image sizes! Alpine Linux doesn't get enough credit for this; in addition to being a great base image, it was also the first distro
23.
by avsm 6mo ago
Those are global to the machine; generally not an issue and seccomp rules can filter out undesirable syscalls to other containers. But GPU kernel/userspace driver matching has been a huge headache; see https://cacm.acm.org&#
24.
by avsm 6mo ago
Thanks for the kind words! I've been prodding @justincormack to resurrect the single most fun OS unconference I've ever attended -- New Directions in Operating Systems (last held back in 2014). https://operatingsystems.
25.
by avsm 6mo ago
We've given up on native Windows containers in OCaml after trying to use them for our CI builds for many years. See https://www.tunbury.org/2026/02/19/obuilder-hcs/ for our recent switch to HCS inst
26.
by avsm 6mo ago
Docker broke out the build layer into a separate component called BuildKit (see HN discussion recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47166264 ). However, Dockerfiles are so popular because they run shell commands and
27.
by avsm 6mo ago
An extremely random fact I noticed when writing the companion article [1] to this (an OCaml experience report): "Docker, Guix and NixOS (stable) all had their first releases during 2013, making that a bumper year for packagin
28.
by avsm 6mo ago
VPNKit (the SLIRP component) has been remarkably bug free over the years, and hasn't been much of a burden overall. There was another component that we didn't have room to cover in the article that has been very stable (for filesy
29.
by avsm 6mo ago
We first submitted the article to the CACM a while ago. The review process takes some time and "Twelve years of Docker containers" didn't have quite the same vibe.
30.
by avsm 6mo ago
(coauthor of the article here) Well, before Docker I used to work on Xen and that possible future of massive block devices assembled using Vagrant and Packer has thankfully been avoided... One thing that's hard to capture in the articl

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