Galois, Inc. is pleased to announce the immediate release of the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine (or HaLVM), version 1.0. The HaLVM is a port of the GHC runtime system to the Xen hypervisor, allowing programmers to create Haskell programs that run directly on Xen’s “bare metal.” Internally, Galois has used this system in several projects with much success, and we hope y’all will have an equally great time with it.
What might you do with a HaLVM? Pretty much anything you want. 🙂 Explore designs for operating system decomposition, examine new notions of mobile computation with the HaLVM and Xen migration, or find interesting network services and lock them inside small, cheap, single-purpose VMs.
The HaLVM is the result of many years of effort, by many people inside Galois. Although it is not yet totally bug-free, we have decided that broad adoption wins over perfection and thus we are releasing it for general review. As such, there will be some rough edges, and we urge you to read the documentation to understand the platforms we test on.
We are releasing the HaLVM under a non-restrictive BSD3 license. You can find it here:
We welcome user feedback, feature requests, bug notices, patches, and feature additions; see the page above for guidelines on getting involved.
Finally, we’d like to give many things to the GHC and Xen communities, without which this work would not be possible.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact the HaLVM’s maintainers at halvm-devel@community.galois.com.
Have a lovely day!