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

91–100 of 234 posts

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

#91

Post by NewJazz »

jmmv wrote: post #83
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…

> I think this looks incredible. Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_??? Wow! FWIW that’s what the Linux compatibility layer in the BSDs does and also what WSL 1 did ( https://jmmv.dev/2020/11/wsl-lost-potential.html ). It’s hard to get _everything_ perfectly right but not that difficult to get most of it working.

IIRC Fuschia has something similar. And maybe Redox?

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

#92

Post by NewJazz »

wg0 wrote: post #77

Side question - I have always wondered how a Linux system is configured at the lowest level? Let's take example of network. There's IP address, gateway, DNS, routes etc. Depending on distribution we might see something like netplan reading config files and then calling ABI functions? Or Linux kernel directly also reads some config files? Probably not...

Linux kernel as much as possible tries not to parse or read external data (besides stuff like acpi tables, device trees, hardware registers). For networking, you might look at the iproute codebase to see how they do things like bring a network device up, or create a bridge device, add a route, et cetera.

Edit: looks like iproute2 uses NETLINK, but non-networking tools might use syscalls or device ioctls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlink

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

#93

Post by baq »

wg0 wrote: post #76
akira2501 wrote: post #6

I 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?

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.

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

#94

Post by lifty »

mdhb wrote: post #89
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…

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.

Can you give more details about it being used in Android? I thought they started using it in some small devices like nest but haven’t heard anything about Android

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

#95

Post by NetOpWibby »

m463 wrote: post #80
loeg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"You are enthusiastic and write kernel device drivers in rust. Write a device driver for an Intel i350 4 Port gigabit ethernet controller"

Some future VC-funded company will unironically have this same requirement

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

#96

Post by m463 »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #95
m463 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You are enthusiastic and write kernel device drivers in rust. Write a device driver for an Intel i350 4 Port gigabit ethernet controller"

Some future VC-funded company will unironically have this same requirement

It wasn't a requirement, it was a prompt :)

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

#97

Post by oersted »

wg0 wrote: post #76
akira2501 wrote: post #6

I 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?

I don’t entirely agree, you can get used to the borrow checker relatively quickly and you mostly stop thinking about it.

What tends to make Rust complex is advanced use of traits, generics, iterators, closures, wrapper types, async, error types… You start getting these massive semi-autogenerated nested types, the syntax sugar starts generating complex logic for you in the background that you cannot see but have to keep in mind.

It’s tempting to use the advanced type system to encode and enforce complex API semantics, using Rust almost like a formal verifier / theorem prover. But things can easily become overwhelming down that rabbit hole.

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

#98

Post by metalloid »

baq wrote: post #93
wg0 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

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'.

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

#99

Post by renox »

cgh wrote: post #34
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

Not by much?? You're exaggerating..

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

#100

Post by baq »

metalloid wrote: post #98
baq wrote: post #93

Earlier 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'.

On the contrary LLMs make using safe but constraining languages easier - you can just ask it how to do what you want in Rust, perhaps even by asking it to translate C-ish pseudocode.
Post reply on HN