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> Linux-compatible ABI There's no specification of that ABI, much less a compliance test suite. How complete is this compatibility?
https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....
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…
Couldn't you just boot the Linux kernel directly and launch a generic app as pid 1 instead of a full blown init system with a bunch of daemons? That's basically what you're getting with Docker containers and a shared kernel. AWS Lambda is doing something similar with dedicated kernels with Firecracker VMs
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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 A P I 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…
The Linux kernel community takes ABI compatibility for userland very seriously. That developers in userland are frequently unwilling to understand issues surrounding ABI stability is not the fault of the Linux kernel.
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 they will not replace Linux as we have it today.
(Asterinas, from what I understood, doesn't claim to replace Linux, but it a common expectation.)
> Linux-compatible ABI There's no specification of that ABI, much less a compliance test suite. How complete is this compatibility?
Here is a list of implemented syscalls, but of course each checked one could still be slightly incompatible: https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/linux-compatibility....
Decades 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…
> Torvalds seemed optimistic that "some clueless young person will decide 'how hard can it be?'" and start their own operating system in Rust or some other language. If they keep at it "for many, many decades", they may get somewhere; "I am looking forward to seeing that". Hohndel clarified that by "clueless", Torvalds was referring to his younger self; "Oh, absolutely, yeah, you have to be all kinds of stupid to say 'I can do this'", he said to more laughter. He could not have done it without the "literally tens of thousands of other people"; the "only reason I ever started was that I didn't know how hard it would be, but that's what makes it fun".
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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.
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Rust code is usually well commented in my experience.
Instead of asking "what other languages and project (open/closed, big/small, web/mobile/desktop, game/consumerapp/bizapp) have you experience with as to come to this conclusion?" people down vote you. So lemme ask: what other languages and project (open/closed, big/small, web/mobile/desktop, game/consumerapp/bizapp) have you experience with as to come to this conclusion?
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 t…
I'm curious about the practical aspect: Are they going to freeze a stable driver ABI, or are they going to break proprietary drivers from time to time?