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BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

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Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#31

I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia? Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where t…

It's even harder to get an accurate picture of what Chinese companies are actually doing. Like the wiki page for Huawei's OS Next is pretty incredible. By which I mean, rather actually unbelievable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?

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Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#32
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that the ones “closest” to the event in question will generally be the ones most qualified and ready to report upon it. Or are the most motivated to push a narrative in relation to it.

Paradoxically (or not) this is precisely what makes their scholarship better than that of a “distant” observer. The problem is that truly neutral authors are also often indifferent ones. Since the Ottomans had such a large influence on the history of Hungary, the scholars of that nation are far more interested in that topic and therefore will study and research it to a much greater level of detail than a scholar work…

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Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.

I feel like this a problem in general for topics outside “the West” or even just the Anglosphere. There is a tantalising amount of information that is siloed away in other languages. I was reading a Wikipedia article on one of the campaigns waged by the Ottomans in Europe and the English version was threadbare (and poorly written) in comparison to the Hungarian Wikipedia equivalent which was three times longer and ha…

I am Hungarian, and lord, our history is really damn extensive (for a country of this size). I can see why it would be 3 times longer. :)

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#34

I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia? Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where t…

It's time to learn Chinese. Especially with advances in RISC-V

/offtop, but could not help... Optimists learn English, pessimists learn Chinese, realists learn AK-74 (or M-16 or whatever one's military is using).

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#35

It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space. That way, interesting kernels like this one can just comply with that and the enormous amounts of Linux modules can be ported to comply with that standard so that they can also be loaded by redox, blueos,etc.. But the complication I suppose is data-structures being accessed by drivers that reside in the c…

IMO, the reason we have a sea of open source drivers available now is because of the lack of a standard driver interface. If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to relea…

> It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.

It's not. At Ksplice we had a build farm and whenever a supported distro would release a new kernel, we would generate new .ko files for that kernel, usually within 24 hours. It was a lot of work, and very much specific to the Ksplice product. These days, between docker and DKMS, and limiting yourself to supporting a specific device, you'd have a much easier time of building a build farm to release a compiled .ko, if you were a hardware manufacturer that wanted to support that.

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#36

I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia? Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where t…

It's even harder to get an accurate picture of what Chinese companies are actually doing. Like the wiki page for Huawei's OS Next is pretty incredible. By which I mean, rather actually unbelievable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?

Having used HarmonyOS, it feels totally like Android. Even the back buttom behavior and the app lifecycle feels the same.

Some might argue that this is intentional, but to me, this more likely shows that HarmonyOS is just a hard fork of Android without sources released and, likely, with their own virtual machine implementation (ARK instead of ART).

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the reason we have a sea of open source drivers available now is because of the lack of a standard driver interface. If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to relea…

> It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases. It's not. At Ksplice we had a build farm and whenever a supported distro would release a new kernel, we would generate new .ko files for that kernel, usually within 24 hours. It was a lot of work, and very much specific to the Ksplice product. These days, between docker and DKMS, and limiting yourself to supporting a specifi…

In any case, proprietary drivers would need to be distributed separately from the Linux kernel because of the GPL license.

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#38
post #3

I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia? Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where t…

I think there might be more of this coming. The era where US was leading everything and expecting everyone to be a good boy who report everything is long gone due to the current state of affairs in the tech world. I'm not Chinese but I can only support such efforts that make everyone less reliable on main actors. That said they even share their work so it's not like they are going full mute.

China's emergence was inevitable - they have the numbers. Last one I heard was 200 million people in STEM careers alone. That's more than the entire US workforce.

I expect technological development to explode and my advice is for anyone interested in it to learn Mandarin. Including myself.

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#39

I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia? Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where t…

> development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening. For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.

> For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture

China is mindblowingly huge. There has to be A LOT happening at any one time.

Re: BlueOS Kernel – Written in Rust, compatible with POSIX

#40
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even harder to get an accurate picture of what Chinese companies are actually doing. Like the wiki page for Huawei's OS Next is pretty incredible. By which I mean, rather actually unbelievable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?

They published a paper for it, which includes more details. https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

Wait, doesn't that also pretty obviously say it's not a microkernel at all? They use "class 1 mechanism-enforced isolation" which isn't address space space isolation per the paper, and thus they solved ipc performance by not having any ipc - it's monolithic
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