History

2005-2014: birth and maturity

Marionnet was born in April 2005, as a simple text interface to the Netkit scripts, which were themselves based on User Mode Linux. Jean-Vincent Loddo wrote it in OCaml, at Université Paris 13, for his own courses.

The code was rewritten from scratch in September 2005, to give Marionnet a graphical interface and free it from Netkit. From that version on, the network defined by the user has been drawn automatically at the centre of the window by the dot tool of Graphviz, so users do not have to draw the topology themselves. Luca Saiu joined the project in 2007 and extended its architecture, in particular so that the network could be reconfigured while it runs.

Marionnet then came into use at several universities, in France (Paris 11 in Orsay, Paris 12 in Créteil, the IUT de Béziers) and abroad (Pisa, Wuhan, Rio de Janeiro). It ran smoothly with networks of about fifteen machines, even on old computers. Its interface was internationalised with GNU gettext, and the project was presented at two international computer science conferences, at several French events and at FOSDEM. Of the two international papers, the first (ML Workshop, 2007) tells how the software was built; the second (SimulationWorks, 2008) presents it from the user’s point of view, component by component, as it was then. In 2010, development moved to Launchpad, where it still is. In February 2011, version 0.90 added the Gateway, a link to the Internet that can be used, for instance, to update the virtual machines.

2020-2026: the overhaul

After some years of quiet maintenance, Marionnet found a second life in 2020: during the lockdown, Mariotel, the prototype of MarioNUM, ran it in a browser window, with nothing to install on the student’s computer.

In 2026, Marionnet was thoroughly overhauled:

• the code moved from Bazaar to git, its build system to dune and its compiler to OCaml 5;
• privileges: the daemon that ran as root is gone; privileges are granted by the machine’s administrator, and only requested when they are needed;
• projects are saved in a text format (JSON), and old ones can still be read;
• features: it gained the NAT bridge, a LAN bridge that Marionnet builds by itself (the old bridge required configuring the host by hand), scripting through the control channel, the exam mode, a Linux 6.12 kernel and a Debian 13 image;
• installation is done from signed repositories, for apt, dnf and zypper;
• the twelve translations of the interface were completed;
• this website was rebuilt, fully static, with Hugo, a free-software site generator (thanks to Steve Francia, who created it in 2013, and to Bjørn Erik Pedersen, who has led its development since 2015); it is hosted by the Université numérique Île-de-France (UNIF).

What changes for the user is detailed in What’s new in 2026.