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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

#61

Post by bcrl »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43
bcrl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh sure, the user-space ABI is stable; I meant kernel-space. Although I realize now that I failed to write that explicitly.

The past 30 years of the Linux kernel's evolution has proven that there is no need for a stable kernel ABI. That would make refactoring, adding new features and porting to new platforms exceedingly difficult. Pretty much all of the proprietary kernel modules have either become open source or been replaced by open source replacements. The Linux community doesn't need closed source kernel modules for VMWare anymore, and even Nvidia has finally given up on their closed source GPU drivers. Proprietary Linux kernel modules have no place in the modern world.

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

#63

Post by ackfoobar »

loeg wrote: post #46
weinzierl wrote: post #44

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…

More recently, in a similar vein: > 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 hav…

> Hohndel clarified that by "clueless", Torvalds was referring to his younger self

As the saying goes "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

Occasionally these are starts of great things.

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

#64

Post by ozgrakkurt »

exabrial wrote: post #58

I think this looks incredible. Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_??? Wow! > utilize the more productive Rust programming language Nitpick: it’s 2024 and these ‘more productive’ comparisons are silly, completely unscientific, And a bit of a red flag for your project: The most productive language for a developer is the one they understand what is happening one layer below the level of abstract…

Everyone says what they are used to is better or more productive. Even in assembly vs ruby, some stuff are much easier in assembly and maybe impossible in ruby afaik

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

#65

Post by vlovich123 »

bcrl wrote: post #61
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh sure, the user-space ABI is stable; I meant kernel-space. Although I realize now that I failed to write that explicitly.

The past 30 years of the Linux kernel's evolution has proven that there is no need for a stable kernel ABI. That would make refactoring, adding new features and porting to new platforms exceedingly difficult. Pretty much all of the proprietary kernel modules have either become open source or been replaced by open source replacements. The Linux community doesn't need closed source kernel modules for VMWare anymore, an…

> even Nvidia has finally given up on their closed source GPU drivers.

lol. No. They just added a CPU and then offloaded all the closed source userspace driver code to it leaving behind the same dumb open sourceable kernel driver shim as before (ie instead of talking to userspace it talks to the GPU’s CPU).

> The past 30 years of the Linux kernel's evolution has proven that there is no need for a stable kernel ABI.

What the last 30 years have shown is that there is actually a need for it, otherwise DKMS wouldn’t be a thing. Heck, intel’s performance profiler can’t keep up with the kernel changes which means you get to pick running an up to date kernel or be able to use the open source out-of-tree kernel module. The fact that Linux is alone in this should make it clear it’s wrong. Heck Android even wrote their own HAL to try to make it possible to update the kernel on older devices. It’s an economics problem that the Linux kernel gets to pretend doesn’t exist but it’s a bad philosophical position. It’s possible to support refactoring and porting to new platforms while providing ABI compatibility and Linux is way past the point where it would even be a minor inconvenience - all the code has ossified quite a bit anyway.

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

#66

Post by exabrial »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #64
exabrial wrote: post #58

I think this looks incredible. Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_??? Wow! > utilize the more productive Rust programming language Nitpick: it’s 2024 and these ‘more productive’ comparisons are silly, completely unscientific, And a bit of a red flag for your project: The most productive language for a developer is the one they understand what is happening one layer below the level of abstract…

Everyone says what they are used to is better or more productive. Even in assembly vs ruby, some stuff are much easier in assembly and maybe impossible in ruby afaik

I’m aging myself, but ~17 years ago I was in San Diego for a conference. There was a table level competition to see who could write the fastest program in 20 minutes (we were doing a full text search of a ‘giant’ 5g file). One of the guys at the table wrote some SPARC assembly to optimize character matching that was a hotspot like he was speaking French.

Ah good times.

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

#67

Post by throw4950sh06 »

xiaodai wrote: post #60

Lol. I am Malaysian Chinese but I honestly don't think anyone will put into production a Chinese made kernel. The risk is too high, same as no one will use a Linux distro coming out of Russian, Iran or NK. It's just cultural bias in the west.

You're wrong. A lot of Chinese code and hardware is in production in the west. Huawei networking hardware is widespread, for example.

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

#68

Post by linsomniac »

weinzierl wrote: post #44

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…

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.

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

#69

Post by tredre3 »

throw4950sh06 wrote: post #67
xiaodai wrote: post #60

Lol. I am Malaysian Chinese but I honestly don't think anyone will put into production a Chinese made kernel. The risk is too high, same as no one will use a Linux distro coming out of Russian, Iran or NK. It's just cultural bias in the west.

You're wrong. A lot of Chinese code and hardware is in production in the west. Huawei networking hardware is widespread, for example.

> Huawei networking hardware is widespread

That's an interesting example because Huawei equipment is currently being removed by several Western countries (UK, Canada, US, Germany) specifically because it's Chinese.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/business/huawei-germany-b...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/huawei-5g-decision-1.631083...

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/huawei-to-be-removed-from...

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-open-progr...

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

#70

Post by monocasa »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #33
cgh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/suppor…

This was true a decade ago, with modern io_uring dpdk is probably an anti-pattern.

I'm not sure that's true for a good chunk of the workloads that dpdk really shines on.

A lot of the benefit of dpdk is colocating your data and network stack in the same virtual memory context. io_uring I can see getting you there if you have you're serving fixed files as a cdn kind of like netflix's appliances, but for cases where you're actually doing branchy work on the individual requests, dpdk is probably a little easier to scale up to the faster network cards.

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