frontloberne/LearnMore/About

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---
title: Tiny Imaginary Computers
author: Reynir Björnsson
---
This website is running as a *Mirage unikernel*.
A traditional application is one or more programs that run in an operating system on a computer alongside other programs.
A *unikernel* is a program that is also an operating system.
That sounds boring -- an operating system where only one program ever runs?!
And that is correct, this is often not what you want.
Luckily, modern machines have the capability to run many *virtual machines*.
This provides some benefits:
- A virtual machine is well isolated from other virtual machines.
You don't have to worry about one application messing with the files of another,
or a malicious application sending the private bits from another application somewhere where it doesn't belong.
- You know what your application needs from the operating system, so you can leave out the things that are not needed.
This simplifies things, makes the operating system much smaller.
Furthermore, it's a big security benefit - every bit of code is a potential security issue.
Only a few years ago it was a huge problem for many people because their virtual machine had a vulnerability in the virtual floppy drive!
- The program is self-contained.
All that it needs is packaged up in the unikernel.
In traditional software you often have a number of dependencies that you need on your computer in order to run the application, and they all need to have a compatible version.
This website is using a *library* called [Canopy](https://github.com/Engil/Canopy) that a guy I met in Morocco and later Leipzig wrote.
The first thing it does when it starts is to fetch files that are under *version control*.
This means the files have a log of what was done, and every change is tracked.
You can go back in time if you regret a change!
I made the files public on a website hosted by my friends [data.coop](https://data.coop/).
Whenever I push new changes there Canopy makes sure to get the latest updates.
You are welcome to take a look at the history: [https://git.data.coop/reynir/frontloberne](https://git.data.coop/reynir/frontloberne)
Canopy knows how to make the simple text files look pretty in your web browser.
On the same machine I run another Canopy instance which serves a technical blog at [blog.mirage.reyn.ir](https://blog.mirage.reyn.ir/).
At the moment I'm only running a few other things, but I could easily run 100s of instances.