To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
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Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#2The results are interesting but the whole project is worth a look.
https://people.csail.mit.edu/mengjia/data/2026.SP.fractal.pd...
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#3[flagged]
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#4[flagged]
Worth noting this is pretty standard university PR. It is written with author involvement so it’s likely technically correct but it is aimed at getting it picked up so it often makes it sound flowery and contains multiple descriptions of generally the same thing with different analogies or simplifications that anyone writing an article from this can parrot easily.
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#5I wonder if this could be practical for controlled environment devices like game consoles.
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#6I wonder if this could be practical for controlled environment devices like game consoles.
What do you mean? By the time you have kernel access like that you’ve already won.
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#7I wonder if this could be practical for controlled environment devices like game consoles.
What do you mean? By the time you have kernel access like that you’ve already won.
It’s practical in the sense that it lets a researcher find additional silicon bugs, although most game consoles now use merchant archs anyways
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#8[deleted]
Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#9[flagged]
Worth noting this is pretty standard university PR. It is written with author involvement so it’s likely technically correct but it is aimed at getting it picked up so it often makes it sound flowery and contains multiple descriptions of generally the same thing with different analogies or simplifications that anyone writing an article from this can parrot easily.
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Re: To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
#10The paper's reference to https://github.com/blacktop/darwin-xnu-build does not support the statement made by the paper. It's not redaction or obfuscation that makes building XNU difficult. It's having the right toolchain; modifying makefiles and code to accommodate a slightly different toolchain; and needing a load of extra stuff that isn't pre-supplied with XNU. A lot of the patches and issues there are about compiler differences, language standard differences, and plain missing stuff.
This is a secondary niggle in the larger scheme of things, though. Not using something like XNU in the first place is the way, for the reasons that the paper goes into. (Whilst 'of course it runs NetBSD' applies to the M1, one wouldn't use NetBSD for this for the same reasons that one wouldn't use XNU.) People experienced in this sort of thing likely nodded along at decisions like coöperative rather than preëmptive multitasking.
I wonder whether they considered the Watanabe shell rather than the Debian Almquist shell. They picked vim instead of nvi2, after all.