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Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

gokrazy.org

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Re: Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

#2

Post by cpach »

Very interesting project.

Has anyone tried it?

Apparently they have written their own init: https://gokrazy.org/userguide/process-interface/

This makes me curious. I wonder how well Gokrazy would blend with s6/s6-rc…

If anyone is curious there’s more info about those projects here:

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/

Re: Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

#3

Post by hamburglar »

cpach wrote: post #2

Very interesting project. Has anyone tried it? Apparently they have written their own init: https://gokrazy.org/userguide/process-interface/ This makes me curious. I wonder how well Gokrazy would blend with s6/s6-rc… If anyone is curious there’s more info about those projects here: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/

I’ve tried it. It’s very neat. I wrote a PoC music player on it and it boots up and begins playing music in about 4 seconds if I recall. Has a neat optional web-based service control UI that lets you see the logs and stop/start the “services.” Has a cool dual-boot-image scheme so you can boot a new one and roll back to the old one if needed (takes double the space on the boot drive but it’s still pretty small).

It’s still kind of a toy, however. There is no C runtime, and the maintainer has declared that there never will be (part of the point of the project is not worrying about that kind of complexity) so including anything C-based is going to be an adventure/unsupported. And the maintainer’s use case is custom built personal servers, so he is explicitly ok with, for example, having to hardcode your wireless config because there is no (and apparently never will be) a wpa_supplicant.

But if it had a golang wpa_supplicant implementation and a graphics library (I’ve done a little fb drawing on it and it works but it really needs acceleration) it would make a really nifty platform for little devices with an HDMI UI.

Re: Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

#4

Post by cedws »

gokrazy is a very cool project and something I'd like to see more of. It's not a unikernel per se but it shares the idea of packaging your code and the OS together and shipping it as one. My dream would be a pure Go userspace library to do absolutely anything related to system management you'd need, like managing networking, connecting to Wi-Fi access points, performing upgrades and so on. But it's such a massive undertaking so we're stuck depending on software written in C via FFI or exec'ing shell commands -- pretty gross.

Re: Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

#5

Post by jonpalmisc »

cedws wrote: post #4

gokrazy is a very cool project and something I'd like to see more of. It's not a unikernel per se but it shares the idea of packaging your code and the OS together and shipping it as one. My dream would be a pure Go userspace library to do absolutely anything related to system management you'd need, like managing networking, connecting to Wi-Fi access points, performing upgrades and so on. But it's such a massive und…

I run into this often and share the same desire. I quite like Go, but unfortunately the interaction of "my interests" (such as the userspace library you suggested) and "things Go excels at" isn't very large. Having to do everything important through FFI or shell commands defeats the purpose of writing Go, imo.

Re: Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

#8

Post by bdittmer »

cpach wrote: post #2

Very interesting project. Has anyone tried it? Apparently they have written their own init: https://gokrazy.org/userguide/process-interface/ This makes me curious. I wonder how well Gokrazy would blend with s6/s6-rc… If anyone is curious there’s more info about those projects here: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/

I use it to run internal services I don't want going down when I'm messing around in the homelab. Namely: internal DNS, MQTT broker and various prometheus pollers (e.g. unifi-poller). I'm a big fan of this project.

Re: Gokrazy – A Native Go Userland

#9

Post by PhilippGille »

bdittmer wrote: post #8
cpach wrote: post #2

Very interesting project. Has anyone tried it? Apparently they have written their own init: https://gokrazy.org/userguide/process-interface/ This makes me curious. I wonder how well Gokrazy would blend with s6/s6-rc… If anyone is curious there’s more info about those projects here: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/

I use it to run internal services I don't want going down when I'm messing around in the homelab. Namely: internal DNS, MQTT broker and various prometheus pollers (e.g. unifi-poller). I'm a big fan of this project.

Do you have a blog article or so that describes this in more detail? It sounds interesting!
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