Is that Rust OS going to experience "success" by traditional metrics, such as taking a significant chunk of Linux's marketshare away, and becoming a viable thing you can run on some real piece of hardware for some real purpose? I won't say "no" but it will be at least a decade before that will happen. Not because Rust is bad, or the resulting OS will be bad, but all the entrenched advantages existing OSes have are just staggeringly huge. If a perfect OS jewel of perfection appeared today, but with no other support for it (no software, drivers, applications that can only run on it, etc.) it would be a long, long time for it to get any traction.
Do not attempt to make a new posix system, because we already have giant, entrenched, mature posix OSs and you'll bring nothing new or interesting enough to the table to warrant switching while being held back by the creaking old standard.
I'd be willing to make a lot of sacrifices to move to an OS that met my personal list of wants.
You can only get adoption of a non-POSIX OS if it offers something really unique to the user, or is in a very different market space.
You should encourage people to make native software using the new paradigms and abstractions of the OS, built from the ground up with decades of hindsight, rather than encouraging crappy ports.
> You can only get adoption of a non-POSIX OS if it offers something really unique to the user
At this point, just not being built on 50 year old crappy standards would be pretty unique. I have my own personal wish-list of features that would lure me in even if the only hardware supported was an RPi.
I'd like to see other paradigms explored, too, but it seems unfortunately hard to get there from here.
One thing is for certain: you will not replace the current players by cloning them.
That said, I can't imagine Linux actually having gone very far if it wasn't a UNIX clone. I think it would have been a real long uphill battle and it would have gotten handily beat by whatever open source UNIX clone came along next, for the pure reason that it's much easier to deal with POSIX compliance (and all the software it brings that actually makes it worthwhile to run the OS) when trying to copy a system that already did it and worked out the kinks.
I mean, if someone came out with a free (maybe open source) version of Windows at that time which was legal, we could easily be living in a world where that's the dominant free OS.
I guess what I'm saying that that being vastly better on one metric (in this case, free) doesn't necessarily mean you'll take over a market (because a free operating system that can't run any software isn't very useful), and just being a clone won't either, but being a clone that's generally as good one most metrics and vastly better on a few others (e.g. a UNIX which is also free and open source, instead of just some other UNIX) may.
That said, there is a lot of room to innovate in OS/userspace boundaries that don't rely on POSIX APIs--see epoll/kqueue/iocp for one place where this innovation already occurred. I'd love to see better alternatives to POSIX signals, for example. So an OS that treats POSIX as a mere compatibility layer and not the primary driver of its design could be welcome.
Then who cares about the OS? Why even bother. Just use ChromeOS.
But the really fun possibility is having an OS where "Web" and "Posix" are equally-placed personalities that the OS ran, not only preventing rogue web pages from touching the posix system, but also preventing rogue posix processes from touching the browser (except where the end-user intentionally joins them through the system-provided Open File dialog or by opening the case and removing the debug pin to unlock cross-VM debugging). ChromeOS sort of implements that today, by running custom Linux environments in containers, but I'd rather trust Xen than Docker as the underlying isolation layer.
I think that now is the time for not only new system level programming languages, but now is also the time for new OS implementations using said programming languages. That being said, "now" actually refers to a period of time that will be anywhere from 5 to 25 years long (and you might want to weight that towards the long end).
Sounds like seL4 to be honest, and yeah, it's taking a while to see adoption.
Might you have any recommendations of specific ones worth paying attention to right now?
https://github.com/redox-os/tfs
I wonder how that effects the time horizon for maturity. I've always just assumed that a filesystem takes a good 10 years to be really stable. Maybe my assumptions are way off? Or the facts that its a reimplementation makes that matter much less? Didn't it take BTRFS around this length of be considered production stable?
Due to this, I don't know whether it will be ready at all.
The linux kernel is very unlikely to accept anything other than C. It would further complicate their build system, and raise the (already high) barrier to entry for developers. Rust also does not have the breadth of architecture support that the Linux kernel needs.
* The kernel already contains some C++ which (if you ask C programmers) is not C. And many C programmers are more likely to accept Rust than having to deal with C++.
* AFAIK there is not gcc front-end for Rust yet but LLVM tools can compile the kernel, too. When Rust stabilizes gcc support may come, too.
* The barrier for entry could be lowered by using Rust for Rust programmers if it is employed in some specific modules. The resulting code could be more clear. Not everything in the kernel is pointer pointing and bit shuffling.
* The number of architectures that Rust supports are growing daily.
Are you sure? I don't think the kernel even compiles with a C++ compiler [1]. Also, I just ran cloc on my linux repo and didn't get any actual C++ code.
Perhaps some external kernel modules are written in C++, but that seems like a bad idea too [2].
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=45-Linux... [2] https://www.threatstack.com/blog/c-in-the-linux-kernel
And I'm pretty sure Windows has some C++ in kernel space. It might be limited (no exceptions etc), but that's another matter.
But the key word there is "potential"--Rust, as it stands right now, is not ready to be used in production OSes. Features such as inline assembly or other developments for #[no_std] support need to be worked on and supported in non-nightly modes for any production OS to take notice, for example.
C++ didn't break through because the benefits didn't outweigh the drawbacks compared to straight C (meaning you can implement C++ like concepts in straight C, and not have to deal with a lot of baggage C++ brings).
Rust is a whole other kettle of fish. It has more or less been proven by this point that people cannot write memory safe C, even experts in the language are still introducing memory-unsafe bugs in 2018. Therefore Rust is bringing features the C language cannot offer.
Which isn't to say I know that Rust will be "successful." I don't know that. But I do know it is worth TRYING to see if it can be successful, and C++'s lack of success isn't really a counter-argument.
I'm still sad that Microsoft's Singularity OS[0] never got further developed, interesting concept.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
Or concurrency safe. There aren't many languages that can help with this class of bugs. Like race conditions. (Someone on HN said Pony is another language that has concurrency/thread safety guarantees.)
And I'd wager that C++ can write far better optimized abstractions than a human in C every could. In most cases.
Writing memory-safe C is clearly possible - many other enviroments are written in C. It come down to using a safe subset.
Show me one major piece of C software that does not have frequent memory-safety bugs and I might believe that.
Of course, the existence of one significant not-too-vulnerable C program doesn't really prove a lot either way...
Symbian, BeOS, Haiku, Genode, ARM mbed, macOS IO Kit, Android (specially after Treble), Fuchsia, Windows, IBM mainframes (old PL/S code has been partially replaced with C++) ...
Windows has been slowly moving into C++ since Windows 8, as Microsoft considers C++ the future of systems programming in Windows.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/kernel-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/4oruo1/windows_10_code...
https://os.mbed.com/docs/mbed-os/v5.11/apis/drivers.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/De...
https://genode.org/documentation/genode-foundations-18-05.pd...
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/
https://source.android.com/devices/architecture
https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/hidl-cpp/ind...
https://www.amazon.com/Symbian-OS-Internals-Real-time-Progra...
Rust and C have an advantage because both are fairly close to the metal, Rust in no_std mode isn't much different than C but the compiler is angry at you all the time.
This is commonly accepted wisdom, but it's not entirely true. (It's only a little bit true.)
The kernel is a freestanding environment where big chunks of the standard library are missing. However, the most useful parts, like unique_ptr<T>, can be reimplemented as needed.
The kernel absolutely can support RTTI and exceptions. Porting libcxxrt is relatively simple, for example, even if implementing the entire Itanium C++ ABI is a big task. Though, the kernel should still avoid throwing and catching exceptions in sensitive code like interrupt handlers. This is not radically different from other C++ projects. The use of exceptions is typically discouraged, for example, in tight inner loops.
It is true that enabling RTTI and exceptions causes code size to explode. This is a valid concern. While memory is cheap, cache misses are not cheap. Mark functions and methods with "noexcept" as needed where this becomes a problem.
Finally, it's absolutely true that exceptions make it impossible for the kernel to make solid real-time guarantees. Fortunately, most operating systems only have soft real-time constraints, if that.
What? No... the most useful parts of C++ are its compile-time facilities... templates and type utilities and RAII/smart pointers/etc. (I could go on and on) all of which are still there. You'd lose some runtime stuff like the ability to throw exceptions and some RTTI, which some people already advise each other to avoid in user mode too (not to say I agree, but they're still finding a lot of use in C++ without this). If losing those is equivalent to losing most of C++ for you then you're not really taking advantage of C++ to begin with.
This isn't really true; you still have memory safety, and generics and a sane stdlib.
Memory safety in kernels is hard because you might have to do things like switch stack or even address space and the rust compiler handles such actions rather poorly. Whether or not writing to the rsp register will crash the kernel or successfully pivot the stack is guesswork at best and only works reliably if you code it entirely in inline assembly.
Any privileged code can then be written with those 95% and that's the only weak point left.
Yes, there are a couple of areas where unsafety is required, there isn't any other way.
However 100% of the kernel source code doesn't need to be unsafe.
One is the memory safety that the rust compiler wants to hold and the other is the memory safety you program into a system.
Those can be entirely different with incompatible guarantees, depending on the mission statement of the software.
Some things a kernel must do are unsafe for the rust compiler. Dereferencing a null pointer, for example, is basically a crash in most operating system's userland.
In kernel space a null pointer may be valid memory that points to real data you need to use.
Setting the page tables is unsafe as well; it's almost impossible to guarantee that the following instructions can run in a static manner. You have to validate the page tables you're about to load at runtime and even then the result could be a process crashing.
Those things the compiler is angry about? Those are things that would be runtime errors in C.
`rustc` is pedantic because it needs to be in order to provide the assurances it gives. There is a subset of "valid" Rust code that `rustc` rejects because it isn't smart enough to understand it would be safe, but I would guess that those cases are less common than than the cases of "seemingly valid" Rust code that is in reality problematic if it were accepted.
Beyond that, I would like to hear what errors have made you feel like the compiler "is angry" at you instead of feeling the compiler "is trying to help me". We spend an inordinate amount of effort on 1) accepting code that we should accept by improving ergonomics, 2) provide extensive suggestions when "seemingly correct" code hits the wall of `rustc`'s understanding, language design or things addressable by ergonomics, and 3) provide as good explanations as possible for all other cases. Because of this, I believe the experience of a newcomer today is much better than even a year ago, even though it can still be improved.
I'm very very aware of that though this is not always true.
For example Rust doesn't have a sane way to have a reentrant mutex without including std, which is bad because for interrupts in a kernel you need to either have very fine grained locking and fallbacks or rely entirely on lockless operations. Interrupts can occur on top of eachother in which case it behave a lot worse than simply being reentrant.
rustc yells at me a lot for the solutions this requires because the way I solve it violates ownership rules of rust the hard way to make the code simpler and understandable.
Other times it's when for bizarre reason rust wants the code to implement the Sync and Send traits despite the kernel running alone on the core (there is no threading in that kernel) and I would love to be able to tell rustc to just shut up about this and simply ignore Send, possibly even Sync, on a module level.
Another would be static mutable variables, which are perfectly safe in a single-threaded environment, doubly so if you map that memory on a per-core basis to ensure each kernel has a unique variable value. Esp if you need lazy_static then there aren't many options other than wrapping the data in a mutex for no good reason.
`static mut` is not always safe even in a single-threaded environment, because of reentrance - see also https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/53639.
Reentrance is not the issue here, I guard this inside the data structure, interrupts will be worst case reentrance most of the time.
But without guarding mutability behind some way to indicate interrupts are disabled, or an outright lock, and without guaranteeing no data races (Sync), it's not actually safe.
And the compiler can't make `static mut` safe to use as any of those requirements could be broken and then it's not safe at all anymore.
While the Linux kernel can do this, it's not easy to write from scratch, especially because Linux is in C so the compiler doesn't complain about weird things you do.
> There is a subset of "valid" Rust code that `rustc` rejects because it isn't smart enough to understand it would be safe
Way to tell him he's wrong only to then proceed to directly contradict yourself...
I would guess that most people starting to try out Rust are hitting the latter more often than the former. "Valid" Rust code that `rustc` rejects is uncommon (and for the most part, a bug), but wanted to acknowledge it happens. A "common" case of it would self-referencing structs, but that is considered a bug to be solved. I've only personally experienced problems with valid code being rejected when expressing complex trees involving associated types with their own independent lifetimes[1][2][3].
[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/55756
Outside the kernel, C++ seems to have more significantly broken through that barrier.
In my defense, I linked directly to example source code.
The main actual objection to C++ is that, well, the exception handling model is controversial, and it is especially ill-suited to kernel programming. RTTI can also get thrown in the lump here. Standard libraries aren't going to work in the kernel anyways, and so if you strip that out, what benefits does C++ get you over C? The correct answer, actually, is that you get RAII for added safety, and tooling such as IDEs have better support for finding all implementations of a virtual function than they do function pointers, but for a lot of C programmers, this can be a sense of "real programmers shouldn't need such assistive technology."
I am not familiar with this. Can you way why exactly it is considered controversial?
The way zero-cost exception handling works is you build this large table that says "if there's an exception where the program counter is in this range, jump to this point." There's no added code to the program in normal control flow (hence the name), but when you get an exception, you have to do a mildly expensive unwind and table lookup to get to the code. The table itself also comes with the price of requiring extra relocations for all of the PC offsets, which also comes with a startup hit.
One of the main costs is that unwinding through a function is assumed for all functions, unless proven otherwise. This means, even if you're not using exceptions yourself, the compiler still needs to generate code to catch an exception after every function call, run all destructors in reverse order, and then rethrow the exception. And remember that destructors and constructors are themselves function calls, which therefore might throw exceptions as well. Generating the code to actually do all of this destruction correctly requires adding code to the function to handle this that is not in the normal execution path, which can also cause issues with things such as instruction caches.
A final issue is that exception handling requires RTTI to be able to dispatch to different catch handlers. RTTI needs to be generated for every potential type (this includes POD structs, for example), which is again a codesize bloat issue. For types that have virtual functions, the RTTI information need to be included in the vtable, which means they're not going to be eliminated by dead global elimination passes (as unreferenced POD structs would tend to be).
In short, RTTI and exception handling require a lot of extra tables that have to be generated even if you don't use them. Furthermore, a major concern for kernels, exception handling requires unwind support, which is generally not part of the kernel library repertoire and can be tricky to do manually. Compiling without exceptions and without RTTI is not unusual for large C++ applications for these reasons.
For every non-inlined function call (or one that it otherwise knows additional information about, e.g. with LTCG). For C++, this is a very big difference, since idiomatic C++ has a lot of inlined functions.
I believe there are problems in the handling of exceptions in constructors and destructors, which permeates into other parts of the language such as how arrays are constructed, etc. For one, the only way a constructor can fail is through an exception, and that's pretty heavy-handed for a language which markets itself as "don't pay for what you don't use." So you can't do RAII in C++ without exception handling. (Note that Rust solves this by not even having constructors.)
There are also some problems with exceptions being slow code paths, but that probably varies by compiler.
An operating system can't just crash if memory allocation fails, because it's actually normal for the operating system to run out of memory. If your OS is even a little bit like Windows 95 or System V, it uses all of the "left-over" memory for the file system cache, so every time it tries to allocate memory, it probably needs to flush a page to disk, which takes long enough that the OS will also want to go back into the scheduler to try to find some more work to do while that runs.
Ironically enough, C++ has fallible allocation in the standard library in spite of being ill-suited for it (unless you have exceptions; those can support fallible allocation just fine), while Rust went with the let-it-crash approach in its standard library, despite the fact that the language itself allows you to just return an Option from all the functions that allocate memory.
>In RAII, holding a resource is a class invariant, and is tied to object lifetime: resource allocation (or acquisition) is done during object creation (specifically initialization), by the constructor, while resource deallocation (release) is done during object destruction (specifically finalization), by the destructor. Thus the resource is guaranteed to be held between when initialization finishes and finalization starts (holding the resources is a class invariant), and to be held only when the object is alive. Thus if there are no object leaks, there are no resource leaks.
All of this is violated if you are constructing objects in an 'invalid' state. The whole point of RAII is that you don't do this. If you have to check if the object is in an error state at the start of every method call, then you're not benefiting from RAII.
If you want to redefine things to be different just to win an argument, you can, but it's not something I'm going to continue entertaining as I'm pretty tired of it now.
And just because some low-level pointer primitive allows itself to have a null state doesn't mean your Files and DBConnections, etc., should have free reins to do the same.
I think projects such as MesaLock are interesting because they don't try and start from scratch[1], but instead incrementally improve the status quo.
[1]: Though I love Redox & pals. I'm definitely rooting for their success.
Redox OS on the other hand is a real OS in Rust, already at a basic useful level: https://www.redox-os.org/
As for Rust modules in the Linux kernel, I expect the barriers there to be primarily political. Other proposals for non-C modules in the main tree have not been very welcomed.
A real useful OS in rust? I think this is a complicated question. I don’t see a rust based posix kernel ever taking off in an interesting way, the C based kernels are stable and fairly safe, the community quickly fixes issues when they come up. A new kernel won’t have the architecture and driver support so it will have those downsides with the upside being maybe more safety which is harder to measure. It’s just that compelling. Now a new hypervisor? Maybe some sort of unikernel core? Maybe some sort of container hosting microkernel or some new thing I’m not dreaming up right now? I could see that taking off. I think it would have to be a new thing.
The LLVM bug I've encountered makes it impossible to properly handle interrupts with error codes unless you use [naked], which is unreliable in my experience.
The Rust bugs are on one hand a None variable being initialized to a Some() value and a bug where rust injects a few instructions between inline assembly that corrupt the stack.
These problems can usually be worked around in some ways, it's annoying and means the rust compiler is not quite there yet.
However, with rust it's easier to reason about why an error occured than in C, atleast in my experience, although some things can only be found out by trial and error (corrupted stack or hitting undefined instructions), as a result I would predict that Rust could result in a lot more fun designs and architectures than simply writing a Microkernel (Redox).
Did you file a bug about this? this seems extremely bad.
Wait. There has to be more going on there than just that—perhaps it's some interaction with naked functions?—or else we'd be seeing crashes everywhere from this.
I don't have any naked functions in the relevant binary either.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
Rust is a young language and LLVM based too so I doubt it'll be accepted any time soon.
That said, there is little stopping you from experimenting with writing your own kernel modules in Rust that wouldn't need to make their way into mainline.
For rust modules.. BSD added lua support for kernel modules.. surely linux can tolerate gc-less rust.
^ this... :-)
Also I think people are blinded by that "rust safety" thing for an OS, it doesn't really matter, Redox that is written in Rust had a challenge a year ago about breaking it, it took a few minutes for someone to kernel panic with bad arguments in a user space CLI, so how long do you think it's going to take to have something as secure / stable as Linux for Redox, 10 / 15 years and at the same time you need all the features / drivers to have a usable OS, just forget about it. The only way you can have a "successful" OS nowdays is to target a very specific niche / usecase.
Assuming the rust safety lives up to the type.
Is this (or any other project) likely to ever become a "real" useful os. What about including rust modules in the linux kernel? What are the barriers?