I think this looks incredible. Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_??? Wow!
> utilize the more productive Rust programming language
Nitpick: it’s 2024 and these ‘more productive’ comparisons are silly, completely unscientific, And a bit of a red flag for your project: The most productive language for a developer is the one they understand what is happening one layer below the level of abstraction they are working with. Unless you’re comparing something rating Ruby vs RiscV assembly, it’s just hocus-pocus.
Decades ago Linus Torvalds was asked in an interview if he feared Linux to be replaced by something new. His answer was that some day someone young and hungry would
come along, but unless they liked writing device drivers Linux would be safe.
This is all paraphrased from my memory, so take it with a grain of salt. I think the gist of it is still valid: Projects like Asterinas are interesting and have a place, but they will not replace Linux as we have it today.
(Asterinas, from what I understood, doesn't claim to replace Linux, but it a common expectation.)
I personally dislike rust, but I love kernels, and so I'll always check these projects out.
This is one of the nicer ones.
It looks pretty conservative in it's use of Rust's advanced features. The code looks pretty easy to read and follow. There's actually a decent amount of comments (for rust code).
I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security.
The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware.
I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of hardware as well as network support, and use a sort of Rust OS/abstraction layer for the rest, bypassing or simply not using the originally booted kernel for all user land specific stuff.
> In the framekernel OS architecture, the entire OS resides in the same address space (like a monolithic kernel) and is required to be written in Rust. However, there's a twist---the kernel is partitioned in two halves ... the unprivileged Services must be written exclusively in safe Rust.
Unprivileged services can exploit known compiler bugs and do anything they want in safe Rust. How this affects their security model?
exabrial ·13 minutes ago
> utilize the more productive Rust programming language
Nitpick: it’s 2024 and these ‘more productive’ comparisons are silly, completely unscientific, And a bit of a red flag for your project: The most productive language for a developer is the one they understand what is happening one layer below the level of abstraction they are working with. Unless you’re comparing something rating Ruby vs RiscV assembly, it’s just hocus-pocus.
weinzierl ·1 hours ago
This is all paraphrased from my memory, so take it with a grain of salt. I think the gist of it is still valid: Projects like Asterinas are interesting and have a place, but they will not replace Linux as we have it today.
(Asterinas, from what I understood, doesn't claim to replace Linux, but it a common expectation.)
Show replies
akira2501 ·5 hours ago
This is one of the nicer ones.
It looks pretty conservative in it's use of Rust's advanced features. The code looks pretty easy to read and follow. There's actually a decent amount of comments (for rust code).
Not bad!
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justmarc ·3 hours ago
The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware.
I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of hardware as well as network support, and use a sort of Rust OS/abstraction layer for the rest, bypassing or simply not using the originally booted kernel for all user land specific stuff.
Show replies
hkalbasi ·31 minutes ago
Unprivileged services can exploit known compiler bugs and do anything they want in safe Rust. How this affects their security model?