Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 234 posts

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#21

Post by justmarc »

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security.

The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware.

I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of hardware as well as network support, and use a sort of Rust OS/abstraction layer for the rest, bypassing or simply not using the originally booted kernel for all user land specific stuff.

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#22

Post by treeshateorcs »

justmarc wrote: post #21

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security. The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware. I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of h…

i might be wrong but if it's ABI compatible the same drivers will work?

p.s.: i was wrong

>While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules.

https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#23

Post by justmarc »

treeshateorcs wrote: post #22
justmarc wrote: post #21

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security. The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware. I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of h…

i might be wrong but if it's ABI compatible the same drivers will work? p.s.: i was wrong >While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules. https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....

No, it means you can run Linux userland/apps on this kernel, to the level/depth which they currently support of course.

They might not yet implement everything that's needed to boot a standard Linux userland but you could say boot straight into a web server built for Linux, instead of booting into init for example.

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#24

Post by bicolao »

treeshateorcs wrote: post #22
justmarc wrote: post #21

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security. The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware. I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of h…

i might be wrong but if it's ABI compatible the same drivers will work? p.s.: i was wrong >While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules. https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....

They mention this in https://github.com/asterinas/asterinas/blob/2af9916de92f8ca1...

> While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules.

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#25

Post by justmarc »

bicolao wrote: post #24
treeshateorcs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i might be wrong but if it's ABI compatible the same drivers will work? p.s.: i was wrong >While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules. https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....

They mention this in https://github.com/asterinas/asterinas/blob/2af9916de92f8ca1... > While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules.

It's a lot "simpler" to support a Linux userland as that means one needs to "just" emulate all the Linux syscalls, than to implement the literally countless internal APIs needed for drivers etc, as that would otherwise mean literally reimplementing the whole Linux kernel and that's neither realistic, nor too useful.

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#27

Post by havaker »

The license choice is explained with the following:

> [...] we accommodate the business need for proprietary kernel modules. Unlike GPL, the MPL permits the linking of MPL-covered files with proprietary code.

Glancing at the readme, it also looks like they are treating it as a big feature:

> Asterinas surpasses Linux in terms of developer friendliness. It empowers kernel developers to [...] choose between releasing their kernel modules as open source or keeping them proprietary, thanks to the flexibility offered by MPL.

Can't wait to glue some proprietary blobs to this new, secure rust kernel /s

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#28

Post by cgh »

justmarc wrote: post #21

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security. The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware. I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of h…

If you want truly high-performance networking, you can bypass the kernel altogether with DPDK. So you don't have to worry about alternative kernels for other tasks at all. On the downside, DPDK takes over the NIC entirely, removing the kernel from the equation, so if you need the kernel to see network traffic for some reason, it won't work for you.

You can check out hardware support here: https://core.dpdk.org/supported/nics/

Re: Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

#30

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

treeshateorcs wrote: post #22
justmarc wrote: post #21

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security. The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware. I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of h…

i might be wrong but if it's ABI compatible the same drivers will work? p.s.: i was wrong >While we prioritize compatibility, it is important to note that Asterinas does not, nor will it in the future, support the loading of Linux kernel modules. https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....

Linux doesn't even maintain ABI compatibility with itself, nobody else is going to manage it. The possibility that might work is there's a couple projects that maintain just enough API compatibility to reuse driver code from Linux (IIRC FreeBSD does this for some graphics drivers). But even then you're gambling with whether Linux decides to change implementation details one day, since internal APIs explicitly aren't stable.
Post reply on HN