> Linux-compatible ABI
Does it mean it can re-use the drivers written for hardware to run with linux ?
Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
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Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re writing C and don’t track ownership of values, you’re in a world of hurt. Rust makes you do from day one what you could do in C but unless you have years of experience you think it isn’t necessary.
It was true until LLMs arrive. Feature compilers + IDEs can be integrated with LLMs to help programmers. Rust was a great idea, before LLMs, but I don't see the motivation for Rust when LLMs can be the solution initial for C/C++ 'problems'.
Relying on LLMs to code for you in no way solves the safety problem of C/C++ and probably worsens it.
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#103Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#104> Linux-compatible ABI Does it mean it can re-use the drivers written for hardware to run with linux ?
No. There is no stable ABI nor API for in-kernel device drivers.
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#105Decades 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 the…
I feel like there's a potentially large audience for a kernel that targets running in a VM. For a lot of workloads, a simple VM kernel could be a win.
This is already the reality today with native cloud computing, managed runtimes.
It doesn't matter how the language gets deployed, if the runtime is on a container, a distroless container, or directly running on an hypervisor.
The runtime provides enough OS like services for the programming language purposes.
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#106Besides all examples, Microsoft is now using TockOS for Pluton firmware, another Rust based OS.
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#107I 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). Not bad!
Otherwise is a decent language but what makes it difficult is the borrow semantics and lifetimes. Lifetimes are more complicated to get your head around. But then there's this Arc, Ref, Pinning and what not - how deep is that rabbit hole?
Context: I'm writing a novel kernel in Rust.
Lifetimes aren't bad, the learning curve is admittedly a bit high. Post-v1 rust significantly reduced the number of places you need them and a recent update allows you to elide them even more if memory serves.
Arc isn't any different than other languages, not sure what you're referring to by ref but a reference is just a pointer with added semantic guarantees, and Pin isn't necessary unless you're doing async (not a single Pin shows up in the kernel thus far and I can't imagine why I'd have one going forward).
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#108Decades 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 the…
Also this mysterious new Fuchsia OS from Google is also shooting for full Linux compatibility and is about to show up in Android, I think this is a much more realistic path of the next generation of operating systems that have a real chance to replace Linux but who knows what their actual plans are here at the moment but I don’t believe for a moment that that project is dead in any way.
I wonder if decision for stable syscalls was genius? Like imagine that Linux syscalls will become what C ABI is now. And there will be multiple compatible kernels, so you can choose any and run the same userspace.
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was true a decade ago, with modern io_uring dpdk is probably an anti-pattern.
Interesting, it's been awhile since I looked at this stuff so I did a little searching and found this: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1789103/FULLTEXT... Their conclusion is io_uring is still slower but not by much, and future improvements may make the difference negligible. So you're right, at least in part. Given the tradeoffs, DPDK may not be worth it anymore.
That's an interesting and valuable study. I was slightly disappointed though that only a single host was used in the 'network' performance tests:
"SR-IOV was used on the NIC to enable the use of virtual functions, as it was the only NIC that was available during the study for testing and therefore the use of virtual functions was a necessity for conducting the experiments."
Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Otherwise is a decent language but what makes it difficult is the borrow semantics and lifetimes. Lifetimes are more complicated to get your head around. But then there's this Arc, Ref, Pinning and what not - how deep is that rabbit hole?
If you’re writing C and don’t track ownership of values, you’re in a world of hurt. Rust makes you do from day one what you could do in C but unless you have years of experience you think it isn’t necessary.
Okay, I think it is is more like Typescript. You hate it but one day you just write small JS program and convert it to Typescript to discover that static analysis alone had so many code paths revealed that would have resulted in uncaught errors and then you always feel very uncomfortable writing plain Javascript.
But what about tools like valgrind in context of C?