Bheem OS, "a next generation secure operating system." Inspired some by Spectrum. So new they can't keep their blog online. Here's a snapshot of a recent blog post about the security features https://blog.openw3b.org/crosvm-for-os-and-app-virtualizatio...
I would wager that 99% of xen related development is intended, as it should be, for dom0 server environments that will never have a keyboard, mouse or 3D capable video card plugged into the bare metal.
I use nvidia every day with qubes, but just for display output. I sometimes see memory leaks where it will draw screen buffers from booting alternate OSes on another drive.
As is everything written in nix!
If it was ported to ARM and had a decent GUI interface builder, it could become a killer OS for making interface panels for appliances. Some manufacturers are repurposing Android for this task, however this forces them to use much powerful hardware, and their UX is still laggy.
On first glance, Essence looks like it makes efficient use of hardware resources and, as you say, an ARM port makes sense. I can visualise an OS version of web packer type tools where you rollup your app/gui and just enough OS to run them on the target. I can say that people who I've worked for would pay good money for that sort of kit. Not suggesting closed source, but in terms of the usual caveat to management - paid support, open source longevity etc.
And yeah, it’s not going to have real world adoption soon. Neither did linux.
Every non-commercial OS starts out as a labour of love.
Good luck to them :)
Tell that to Andrew Tanenbaum
Qubes is the best and most currently complete thing i've seen (In the last couple years its also made progress supporting GPU domain). Its not perfect and has some controversial opinions like default passwordless sudo in VMs, but it is still far ahead of most distro's security.
For me Qubes 4.1 performs well though I have it on an m.2 and have plenty of ram. It boots quickly, with the only seriously slow thing being VM startup. I'm able to do all my dev work and use Windows for work related things on it as well as have disposable browsers for banking and sketchy sites.
Knowing nothing more than what you've just told me: That doesn't sound like a bad thing, IMO; if you're using that kind of system, you probably care a lot about security, and I'm not sure I'd trust a shared-kernel system against malicious code. (I appreciate that other people may make that trade-off very differently)
Written in Rust.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Labor of love for a decade
Kind of like MacPaint is an App but MacOS is an OS
Actually Qubes has relatively small CPU overhead due to its utilization of hardware VT-d virtualization. RAM usage is huge though. Source: using it as my daily driver.
I wonder if I can have a Qubes VM with Essence working.
Where operating systems are headed is more towards security (process isolation, bulletproof input etc), not lightweight GUIs on top of thin kernels like this.
Are there any passion (or other) projects that explore this? I know about Qubes, but that's more like a heavy layer on top of a heavy duty GUI, on top of a Linux kernel.