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I am the creator of Redox OS. It is a microkernel based operating system mostly written in Rust. Please ask any questions or make any comments you have about Redox! EDIT: I am going to sleep soon. I will be up in 8 hours, 7 A.M. Mountain Time.
I've been seeing Redox develop for a while now, and I've got to say—it's really amazing what such a small group of people can accomplish. They have innovative tools in all sorts of areas of computer science. Including coreutils, binutils, a shell (along with a custom shell scripting language), common GUI applications, a hash function, a file system, etc. One of the coolest aspects of all of these tools are that they…
Stub out the interface that the kernel needs, and provide an interface for the bits (reading disk blocks and so on) that the file system needs from the kernel. This way, you can decouple it completely from the kernel, test it independently, port it without forking the code, and then it can easily be used in userland, too.
I've been seeing Redox develop for a while now, and I've got to say—it's really amazing what such a small group of people can accomplish. They have innovative tools in all sorts of areas of computer science. Including coreutils, binutils, a shell (along with a custom shell scripting language), common GUI applications, a hash function, a file system, etc. One of the coolest aspects of all of these tools are that they…
I’ve always found it weird that things like file systems in the Linux kernel are so tightly coupled. Why isn’t, say, Ext4 written like a library? (Or is it? I don’t think it is?) Stub out the interface that the kernel needs, and provide an interface for the bits (reading disk blocks and so on) that the file system needs from the kernel. This way, you can decouple it completely from the kernel, test it independently,…
I am the creator of Redox OS. It is a microkernel based operating system mostly written in Rust. Please ask any questions or make any comments you have about Redox! EDIT: I am going to sleep soon. I will be up in 8 hours, 7 A.M. Mountain Time.
I've been seeing Redox develop for a while now, and I've got to say—it's really amazing what such a small group of people can accomplish. They have innovative tools in all sorts of areas of computer science. Including coreutils, binutils, a shell (along with a custom shell scripting language), common GUI applications, a hash function, a file system, etc. One of the coolest aspects of all of these tools are that they…
Also, I'll pat myself on the back and say the Ion shell looks nice, because it borrowed some ideas from the Oil shell [1] :) In particular, we talked a fair bit about the array syntax and semantics, and lack of word splitting.
I've been seeing Redox develop for a while now, and I've got to say—it's really amazing what such a small group of people can accomplish. They have innovative tools in all sorts of areas of computer science. Including coreutils, binutils, a shell (along with a custom shell scripting language), common GUI applications, a hash function, a file system, etc. One of the coolest aspects of all of these tools are that they…
I’ve always found it weird that things like file systems in the Linux kernel are so tightly coupled. Why isn’t, say, Ext4 written like a library? (Or is it? I don’t think it is?) Stub out the interface that the kernel needs, and provide an interface for the bits (reading disk blocks and so on) that the file system needs from the kernel. This way, you can decouple it completely from the kernel, test it independently,…
There are a lot of small operating systems that take the decoupled route - but you'll almost certainly never see them because they're either research-based, or suffer from the problem of most hobbyist operating systems which is "lack of hardware support". Doesn't matter how modern/sexy an O/S is if you cant run it upon your hardware. (Relatedly once you can run it you need software on it too..)
That said there are some compromises available, even with Linux. If you use something like FUSE you can write your own filesystem in 100% user-space - something I've done for a couple of niche applications.
I've been seeing Redox develop for a while now, and I've got to say—it's really amazing what such a small group of people can accomplish. They have innovative tools in all sorts of areas of computer science. Including coreutils, binutils, a shell (along with a custom shell scripting language), common GUI applications, a hash function, a file system, etc. One of the coolest aspects of all of these tools are that they…
I’ve always found it weird that things like file systems in the Linux kernel are so tightly coupled. Why isn’t, say, Ext4 written like a library? (Or is it? I don’t think it is?) Stub out the interface that the kernel needs, and provide an interface for the bits (reading disk blocks and so on) that the file system needs from the kernel. This way, you can decouple it completely from the kernel, test it independently,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve always found it weird that things like file systems in the Linux kernel are so tightly coupled. Why isn’t, say, Ext4 written like a library? (Or is it? I don’t think it is?) Stub out the interface that the kernel needs, and provide an interface for the bits (reading disk blocks and so on) that the file system needs from the kernel. This way, you can decouple it completely from the kernel, test it independently,…
This is the recurring argument about "monolithic kernels" vs "microkernels". In the latter different user-space processes can be used to implement filesystems, networking, etc. There are a lot of small operating systems that take the decoupled route - but you'll almost certainly never see them because they're either research-based, or suffer from the problem of most hobbyist operating systems which is "lack of hardwa…