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Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

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Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#91
post #12
post #9

I did a ctrl+F for the word "redox" here, since that's already modern experimental OS being written in Rust that's existed for some time, and I was surprised not to see it mentioned at all; I figured there would be a section for modern OS neophytes like me comparing and constrasting the two. Anyone have any insight into how this project differs from Redox?

Redox is a unix style operating system with a unix style design and ABI. This operating system shares none of those goals, it seems to focus on a particular challenge related to the abstraction between subsystems of the operating system, following a term they call "state spilling". The goal appears to be to design an architecture that supports in-place updates of most components due to them having tightly constrained…

> The goal appears to be to design an architecture that supports in-place updates of most components due to them having tightly constrained state management and inter-component dependencies.

Strongly reminds me of Erlang-style hot reload.

Have any OS projects based on that architecture ever got off the ground?

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, stuff like older vxworks plays loose and fast with the term microkernel that wouldn't fly today. I don't even think they try to claim that it is one anymore until their most recent release where they actually added (optional) process isolation.

I was thinking more of INTEGRITY OS and similar high integrity computing OSes.

You said "all major OSes were human lives are at risk".

INTEGRITY is a fairly minor player.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#94
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing _a posix filesystem_ as a kernel abstraction is what I said. Which is not very standard for microkernels, and makes it (redox) pretty unix like at the kernel level. The overall point being that both, microkernels can be unix likes, and redox particularly and at the kernel level leans in to being a unix like.

IBM and Unisys mainframes also support POSIX filesystems, as does Windows, so now they are UNIXes?

z/OS is a full blown, certified UNIX. WSL1 makes NT a unix kernel if they wanted to get the certification.

And redox goes beyond them in that the only user mode env it supports is posix with some extensions.

But how is this line germane to the original point again? That somehow being a microkernel means that it can't be a unix like design OS?

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really useful or are they just easy to copy and to rember? Staying power of memes in culture has little to do with their usefulness. Whole lot of popular narratives distract us from the nature of reality rather than helps us interact with it. I would gladly see introduction to particle physics that doesn't show a single sharp rigid sphere.

This is also an argument that is worth considering. Many such distinctions that cannot be made rigorous that stick in various cultures but never existed in others simply exist because a man copies his fellow man, not because they are useful in achieving any goals. Though, as I said, they exist to simplify reality. I assume he human brain works so it does, simply to conserve energy and admit an inaccurate though usual…

Fun thing to do is comparing different cultures and seeing how very popular concepts that supposedly usefully describe common reality in one culture are completely missing from some others with no ill effect.

Like 'dietary fiber' or 'hydration'.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#96
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking more of INTEGRITY OS and similar high integrity computing OSes.

You said "all major OSes were human lives are at risk". INTEGRITY is a fairly minor player.

Not when human lives are at risk.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#97
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM and Unisys mainframes also support POSIX filesystems, as does Windows, so now they are UNIXes?

z/OS is a full blown, certified UNIX. WSL1 makes NT a unix kernel if they wanted to get the certification. And redox goes beyond them in that the only user mode env it supports is posix with some extensions. But how is this line germane to the original point again? That somehow being a microkernel means that it can't be a unix like design OS?

Certified UNIX means having a userspace POSIX library, completely unrelated to kernel architectures.

So if Microsoft bothers to certify WSL2 then Windows is now UNIX?!?

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#98
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made no claim as to the entirety of “philosophy”. I made a claim as to the dealing in identities and the assumption that they can actually be reasoned about. They have no definition and it's merely fuzzy human gut feeling what is and isn't a different identity and different men can't always see eye to eye on it either. One thing I remember well is that I watched a television series as a child that had an magical ob…

You are using identity yourself all the time. You just mentioned philosophy, this TV series, gold, that ship and that plank, and on close inspection there would probably be a thousand more cases in your last post where you relied on identity. Identity is one of the most fundamental concepts, without it you would have a hard time splitting the universe into more than one distinct piece in order to reference and talk a…

Quine: "no entity without identity" & "to be is to be the value of a bound variable". IMHO the neatest summation of a rigorous approach to the interface between mathmatical logic and ontology. That's why "Quine is our hero", as one of my lecturers back in the 80s, Jeremy Butterfield, used to say.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "abstraction" you'll probably see how it makes a lot of sense. Every abstraction is a delusion by definition, is it not? Because the abst…

> By that logic you would need to call like half of all useful phenomena that most people's lives consist of and depend on, as "man-made delusion". We still need to interact with our lives, and many of the abstractions help us do that. And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility. > BTW if you just replace the word "delusion" with "…

> It is as foolish as trying to have a scientific investigation about who is beautiful and who isn't.

We actually do have these investigations, and there is a scientific quantification of what is and isn't beautiful. Symmetry is a significant factor, but there are others - many others. Nancy Etcoff's research delves into this - she even wrote a book about it - Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty.

Re: Theseus: A modern experimental OS written from scratch in Rust

#100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

z/OS is a full blown, certified UNIX. WSL1 makes NT a unix kernel if they wanted to get the certification. And redox goes beyond them in that the only user mode env it supports is posix with some extensions. But how is this line germane to the original point again? That somehow being a microkernel means that it can't be a unix like design OS?

Certified UNIX means having a userspace POSIX library, completely unrelated to kernel architectures. So if Microsoft bothers to certify WSL2 then Windows is now UNIX?!?

What defines a “UNIX kernel” anyway?
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