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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

#101

Post by rocqua »

KMag wrote: post #47
mcshaner1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you thinking of HP’s Dynamo? http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp00/cse231/dynamopldi.pdf

It was almost definitely HP Dynamo. (Edit: if you combine ideas from HP Dynamo, SafeTSA JIT-optimized bytecode, and IBM's AS/400's TIMI/Technology Independent Machine Interface, you get a better version of the current Android Run Time for bytecode-distributed apps that compile ahead of time to native code and self-optimize at runtime based on low-overhead profiling.) The really nice thing about Dynamo was that it was…

Could such a compiler include the runtime for this in the binary as an option? That might make it a lot more likely to be used by people, because it is all nice and stand-alone.

Who would benefit from this most? Is the benefit so diffuse it would almost have to be an open-source project without funding? Or could there be parties that see enough of an advantage to fund this?

I guess you could try and get a certain instruction set vendor (probably RISC-V, maybe ARM or x86 based) to have this as a boost for their chips. I guess the "functions are pointers to blocks" compilation could benefit from hardware acceleration.

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

#102

Post by SCHiM »

KMag wrote: post #47
mcshaner1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you thinking of HP’s Dynamo? http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/sp00/cse231/dynamopldi.pdf

It was almost definitely HP Dynamo. (Edit: if you combine ideas from HP Dynamo, SafeTSA JIT-optimized bytecode, and IBM's AS/400's TIMI/Technology Independent Machine Interface, you get a better version of the current Android Run Time for bytecode-distributed apps that compile ahead of time to native code and self-optimize at runtime based on low-overhead profiling.) The really nice thing about Dynamo was that it was…

This project grew into an insanely powerful tool. It's called DynamoRIO and is still under active development and use today. It's one of the coolest technologies I've ever worked with.

It's used by the winafl fuzzer to provide basic block coverage for black box binaries.

https://dynamorio.org

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

#103

Post by rocqua »

_underfl0w_ wrote: post #38

I was wondering how the project relates to the name - i.e. if there's some single holdover remnant or concept about it or if it's a hodgepodge of parts or something. Seems like it might be due to the modular nature of the kernel being spread across several Rust Crates. Clever reference! From the "High Level Overview" doc (not the readme) : > The Theseus kernel is composed of many small entities, each contained within…

I think its because they want to enable hot-swapping elements of the kernel, so you could have replaced every part of the kernel without ever having to have rebooted.

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

#105

Post by mdtrooper »

mdtrooper wrote: post #104

Another "open source" OS (instead free software) warm from oven ready for steal for "big companies". When I knew about Redox OS, I thought great but has it MIT license? really? And this new OS is under MIT license too....really?

https://discourse.redox-os.org/t/mit-licence-really-suitable...

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

#106

Post by bregma »

harry8 wrote: post #45
monocasa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A microkernel is a valid implementation for a unix like. The way that posix filesystem semantics are a kernel provided abstraction is very "unix style".

Yeah totally valid implementation of which there have been a great many attempts, far too many to list here. Precisely none of them in 3-5 decades has managed to deliver on the promise of microkernels prompting the question: "Were huge microkernel advantages actually greatly oversold, is posix a massively debilitating factor that prevents microkernel based systems from delivering on their raison d'etre or was every s…

The POSIX layer of QNX is almost exclusively a (collection of) optional services or wrappers in userspace. In what way is it a failure or a poor implementation of a microkernel?

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

#107

Post by bogomipz »

kev009 wrote: post #15
raggi wrote: post #8

I do wonder about single address space, I've seen a few experimental systems follow this strategy lately and it feels reliant on hardware less defective than we presently have in commodity user gui performance systems.

IBM i (OS/400) has had single address space, tagged pointers, and an number of other "novel" things in the loop for eons. Many people interact with it daily, indirectly, in most of your big box retail stores (think stores like Costco, Lowes, etc).

I'm curious about tagged pointers, do those relate to the single address space design? Might you or someone else have any good links on this?

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #97
monocasa wrote: post #94

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?!?

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by guyomes »

dragonwriter wrote: post #87
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to assume that any process reasoning or thinking has to be scientific to be useful. A very dubious proposition. No, in fact, I clearly said that they were useful but not scientific. My problem with The Ship of Theseus , is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics. > Giving your example, thinking about who is beautiful and who isn't (not "Scientific Study", just…

> My problem with The Ship of Theseus, is that it prætends to be scientific, whereas it is merely a futile quibble of semantics. It doesn't pretend to be scientific (it does not purport to offer or relate to testable empirical hypotheses), it is a philosophical thought exercise illustrating that the concept of identity of a composite of mutable composition (pretty much every concrete thing in the real world) is arbit…

The Ship of Theseus is a quite old thought exercise. At that time, science and philosophy were not as separated as today. Actually, after reading the nice comic book Logicomix [0], I learned that the philosophical thought exercise of Wittgenstein, Russel and others, on trying to rationalize the world at the beginning of the 20th century, is actually what lead to a fundamental axiomatic redefinition of mathematics themselves. So it seems far stretch to call philosophical thought experiment not scientific.

I agree that it is not scientific in the modern sense, after Karl Popper introduced the concept of falsifiability in 1935 [1], shortly after Hilbert advocated for rigorous proofs in mathematics in 1917 [2]. Although at that point, it is mostly a matter of vocabulary, thought experiments seem necessary for the advance of science.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_hypothesis

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program

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