5 ms·

.NET framework ported to NetBSD

263 points by nbyouri 10y ago

CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
Can I be the first to call it .NETBSD?
- draw_down 10y ago
  How about "Net-Net"
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    Net.NET
    - happycube 10y ago
      netbsd.net works too, and actually goes to the home page ;)
nbyouri 10y ago
NetBSD is a very portable BSD-licensed operating system. This is CoreCLR, the open source .NET framework from Microsoft. Why is this important? Programs for NetBSD can be run in a stripped down NetBSD kernel and libc (a unikernel) called rumpkernel, which can be run on any platform, including on bare metal. It is also extremely minimal - an operating system image for nethack was a mere 4MB. Rump can also run on any architecture that NetBSD runs on (including MIPS, VAX, m68k, as well as standard platforms like amd64 and ARM) and also on those without fully NetBSD support, but just with a functional C compiler (like RISCV). Many people use rump as an extremely lightweight container - it can run on Linux and others. Rump was recently used to port NetBSD audio drivers to GNU/Hurd. Caveats: doesn't run in rump yet, but this is a big step towards it. .NET is also not self-hosting yet, and requires assemblies (CoreFX) to be cross-compiled from Linux. The work was done almost entirely by Kamil Rytarowski, a NetBSD developer, in his free time. Good job Kamil!
- tomcam 10y ago
  Super helpful explanation & context. Thank you
- callinyouin 10y ago
  I was wondering "why NetBSD???", other than as a possible hobby project, but your explanation gives a pretty clear answer. I've never even heard of rump, and know little to nothing about NetBSD, but this sounds really, really interesting. In my spare time I'm writing a "fantasy console" (along the lines of pico-8) that will run in a framebuffer. I wonder if this would be a good fit.
  - themartorana 10y ago
    Forget Docker, the future is unikernels! [0] I haven't gotten to play with them much, and the ecosystem is very, very young, but the idea of it all is very intriguing to me. [0] https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun
    - braderhart 10y ago
      How can you compare a kernel application vs a process isolation layer? Containers will be adopted to dynamically load kernel modules and then we'll have dynamic "rump" kernels, but saying to forget Docker and the future is Unikernels, doesn't make a lot of sense technically.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  How is the rump kernel any different than a unikernel?
  - ihsw 10y ago
    Not a whole lot, tbh, The idea is to run directly on the hypervisor/hardware, and they both do that. In actuality they're pretty far from each-other but conceptually they are the same. Here is the rumprun unikernel: https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun
kingmanaz 10y ago
NetBSD scales well. See SDF.org for working example. Hundreds of users from around the world online simultaneously at any given moment, thousands of Unix commands and services being used and consumed, and despite all that, a great security record and good performance. NetBSD really is a nice system and deserves to be as popular as the other BSDs ( Free-, Open-, etc. ).
iamabhi9 10y ago
Great work :)
toomanythings2 10y ago
And Microsoft loves Linux, too.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
Wrong way around. Generally we port NetBSD to something else. This headline should be "NetBSD ported to .NET framework"
bloaf 10y ago
I've been reading around to try to get a clearer picture of what is going on under the hood in Microsoft land. Essentially, I'm curious what it would take to build an OS like Inferno, but that provides the CLR as a VM for CIL instead of Limbo. 1. Am I correct in thinking that this is sort of what NetBSD has done? 2. Does this mean that through Roslyn + RyuJIT, NetBSD gets to run programs written in C#, F#, and other visual-* languages? 3. How close to support for things like WPF/UWP does this get NetBSD?
- floatboth 10y ago
  1. No? NetBSD is a classic UNIX system. With rumpkernel though. http://rumpkernel.org http://rumpkernel.org I guess you could build a system like that with rumprun maybe… 2. Yes. But running those languages was possible even before that, thanks to Mono. CoreCLR is just the new, shiny, lightweight and MS official thing. 3. Hahahahaha nope. WPF and UWP are proprietary. I don't think there are any alternative implementations of them. Mono has an implementation of good old WinForms though :D
  - bloaf 10y ago
    1. I was just curious if, by implementing the CLR, they have effectively implemented a VM for CIL in their OS, not if they reproduced Inferno. 3. My question was how close it came. In other words, what else would your OS need in order to be compatible with something like a cross-platform app created in Xamarin.
    - sitharus 10y ago
      3) Not close at all. UWP and WPF are proprietary Windows technologies that rely on the Windows APIs. They're closed source so nobody really knows what they need. Cross platform Xamarin apps are different. Xamarin has its own GUI library wrappers but do not provide a cross platform library (or at least they didn't last time I checked. They'd need to create one for GTK/Qt/X/whatever and devs would have to write for it
      - 10y ago
josteink 10y ago
From a former contributer's point of view, it's fun checking the commits it took to make this happen. From what I can tell, some of the work I put in to get CoreCLR work on FreeBSD (which again built on others work to make it run on Linux and OSX), now makes it happy to run on NetBSD too. This is why I like open-source. If my toaster one day runs .NET, I'll be able to say I helped make it happen ;)
- ghuntley 10y ago
  @josteink was one of the main contributors whom ported CoreCLR over to FreeBSD last year. The entire process was a community effort, with minimal help from Microsoft (okay, they provided domain knowledge and guidance). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431368 for previous discussions/celebration.
- swalsh 10y ago
  A toaster running freebsd that connects to azures machine learning service, and automatically tells you if the Virgin Marys face is burned on there. You helped create the future.
mdip 10y ago
As a .NET developer, and lover of all things C#, I couldn't be more happy. There's always been that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I'm pigeonholed with a language I can't easily use on other platforms (Mono's been around for a while and I've used it but I ran into a variety of problems the last time I targeted it[1]). "Officially" supporting alternative platforms gives me the opportunity to write code in a language I prefer for the handful of Linux boxen I've had here. I'm looking forward to poking around with this in NetBSD. I've had a box doing virtually nothing here for a while running an old version -- guess it's time to upgrade! The thing that still makes me hang on to other languages is uptake. I haven't looked in a little while, but back when Mono was "it", the number of applications available outside of Windows was pretty small. Basing an application on Mono tended to come with grief lobbed at the developer[2]. Has any of that changed or shown signs of changing since CoreCLR was released? [1] I'll be the first to admit that these problems had workarounds I wasn't familiar with at the time and though I had no similar problems with a handful of CoreCLR apps I've written, I was far more researched at my second attempt and would have probably been successful with either had I bothered to try. [2] I tried to find examples - my memory is not serving me well but I thought a component of OpenSUSE or something along those lines was written targeting Mono and was later scrapped for another technology due to weak community support. The best example of complaints I could find is http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mono-a-gratuitous-risk-the-free-software-column http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mono-a-gratuitous-risk-t...
- tracker1 10y ago
  IIRC there was a note taking app that was included with Ubuntu for a while. It was mainly removed to save the disk space (the target at the time was CD size), but there was a lot of negative feedback about it at the time. Some of the negative feedback was deserved, but I think most of it was FUD. I tried to run Mono for some things earlier on, and it was just a lot of effort for things that worked so well in Windows at the time. I think the CoreCLR work and acquiring Xamarin definitely show some work in the right direction here. I've been doing mostly node.js dev for the past few years, may consider .Net again... tbh, more interested in looking at Go for something though, as an excuse to learn. I do miss some niceties with VS though.

263 points by nbyouri 10y ago

CiPHPerCoder 10y ago

Can I be the first to call it .NETBSD?

draw_down 10y ago
How about "Net-Net"
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Net.NET
  - happycube 10y ago
    netbsd.net works too, and actually goes to the home page ;)

nbyouri 10y ago

NetBSD is a very portable BSD-licensed operating system. This is CoreCLR, the open source .NET framework from Microsoft. Why is this important? Programs for NetBSD can be run in a stripped down NetBSD kernel and libc (a unikernel) called rumpkernel, which can be run on any platform, including on bare metal. It is also extremely minimal - an operating system image for nethack was a mere 4MB. Rump can also run on any architecture that NetBSD runs on (including MIPS, VAX, m68k, as well as standard platforms like amd64 and ARM) and also on those without fully NetBSD support, but just with a functional C compiler (like RISCV). Many people use rump as an extremely lightweight container - it can run on Linux and others. Rump was recently used to port NetBSD audio drivers to GNU/Hurd. Caveats: doesn't run in rump yet, but this is a big step towards it. .NET is also not self-hosting yet, and requires assemblies (CoreFX) to be cross-compiled from Linux. The work was done almost entirely by Kamil Rytarowski, a NetBSD developer, in his free time. Good job Kamil!

tomcam 10y ago
Super helpful explanation & context. Thank you
callinyouin 10y ago
I was wondering "why NetBSD???", other than as a possible hobby project, but your explanation gives a pretty clear answer. I've never even heard of rump, and know little to nothing about NetBSD, but this sounds really, really interesting. In my spare time I'm writing a "fantasy console" (along the lines of pico-8) that will run in a framebuffer. I wonder if this would be a good fit.
- themartorana 10y ago
  Forget Docker, the future is unikernels! [0] I haven't gotten to play with them much, and the ecosystem is very, very young, but the idea of it all is very intriguing to me. [0] https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun
  - braderhart 10y ago
    How can you compare a kernel application vs a process isolation layer? Containers will be adopted to dynamically load kernel modules and then we'll have dynamic "rump" kernels, but saying to forget Docker and the future is Unikernels, doesn't make a lot of sense technically.
saosebastiao 10y ago
How is the rump kernel any different than a unikernel?
- ihsw 10y ago
  Not a whole lot, tbh, The idea is to run directly on the hypervisor/hardware, and they both do that. In actuality they're pretty far from each-other but conceptually they are the same. Here is the rumprun unikernel: https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun

kingmanaz 10y ago

NetBSD scales well. See SDF.org for working example. Hundreds of users from around the world online simultaneously at any given moment, thousands of Unix commands and services being used and consumed, and despite all that, a great security record and good performance. NetBSD really is a nice system and deserves to be as popular as the other BSDs ( Free-, Open-, etc. ).

iamabhi9 10y ago

Great work :)

toomanythings2 10y ago

And Microsoft loves Linux, too.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

Wrong way around. Generally we port NetBSD to something else. This headline should be "NetBSD ported to .NET framework"

bloaf 10y ago

I've been reading around to try to get a clearer picture of what is going on under the hood in Microsoft land. Essentially, I'm curious what it would take to build an OS like Inferno, but that provides the CLR as a VM for CIL instead of Limbo. 1. Am I correct in thinking that this is sort of what NetBSD has done? 2. Does this mean that through Roslyn + RyuJIT, NetBSD gets to run programs written in C#, F#, and other visual-* languages? 3. How close to support for things like WPF/UWP does this get NetBSD?

floatboth 10y ago
1. No? NetBSD is a classic UNIX system. With rumpkernel though. http://rumpkernel.org http://rumpkernel.org I guess you could build a system like that with rumprun maybe… 2. Yes. But running those languages was possible even before that, thanks to Mono. CoreCLR is just the new, shiny, lightweight and MS official thing. 3. Hahahahaha nope. WPF and UWP are proprietary. I don't think there are any alternative implementations of them. Mono has an implementation of good old WinForms though :D
- bloaf 10y ago
  1. I was just curious if, by implementing the CLR, they have effectively implemented a VM for CIL in their OS, not if they reproduced Inferno. 3. My question was how close it came. In other words, what else would your OS need in order to be compatible with something like a cross-platform app created in Xamarin.
  - sitharus 10y ago
    3) Not close at all. UWP and WPF are proprietary Windows technologies that rely on the Windows APIs. They're closed source so nobody really knows what they need. Cross platform Xamarin apps are different. Xamarin has its own GUI library wrappers but do not provide a cross platform library (or at least they didn't last time I checked. They'd need to create one for GTK/Qt/X/whatever and devs would have to write for it
    - 10y ago

josteink 10y ago

From a former contributer's point of view, it's fun checking the commits it took to make this happen. From what I can tell, some of the work I put in to get CoreCLR work on FreeBSD (which again built on others work to make it run on Linux and OSX), now makes it happy to run on NetBSD too. This is why I like open-source. If my toaster one day runs .NET, I'll be able to say I helped make it happen ;)

ghuntley 10y ago
@josteink was one of the main contributors whom ported CoreCLR over to FreeBSD last year. The entire process was a community effort, with minimal help from Microsoft (okay, they provided domain knowledge and guidance). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431368 for previous discussions/celebration.
swalsh 10y ago
A toaster running freebsd that connects to azures machine learning service, and automatically tells you if the Virgin Marys face is burned on there. You helped create the future.

mdip 10y ago

As a .NET developer, and lover of all things C#, I couldn't be more happy. There's always been that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I'm pigeonholed with a language I can't easily use on other platforms (Mono's been around for a while and I've used it but I ran into a variety of problems the last time I targeted it[1]). "Officially" supporting alternative platforms gives me the opportunity to write code in a language I prefer for the handful of Linux boxen I've had here. I'm looking forward to poking around with this in NetBSD. I've had a box doing virtually nothing here for a while running an old version -- guess it's time to upgrade! The thing that still makes me hang on to other languages is uptake. I haven't looked in a little while, but back when Mono was "it", the number of applications available outside of Windows was pretty small. Basing an application on Mono tended to come with grief lobbed at the developer[2]. Has any of that changed or shown signs of changing since CoreCLR was released? [1] I'll be the first to admit that these problems had workarounds I wasn't familiar with at the time and though I had no similar problems with a handful of CoreCLR apps I've written, I was far more researched at my second attempt and would have probably been successful with either had I bothered to try. [2] I tried to find examples - my memory is not serving me well but I thought a component of OpenSUSE or something along those lines was written targeting Mono and was later scrapped for another technology due to weak community support. The best example of complaints I could find is http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mono-a-gratuitous-risk-the-free-software-column http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/mono-a-gratuitous-risk-t...

tracker1 10y ago
IIRC there was a note taking app that was included with Ubuntu for a while. It was mainly removed to save the disk space (the target at the time was CD size), but there was a lot of negative feedback about it at the time. Some of the negative feedback was deserved, but I think most of it was FUD. I tried to run Mono for some things earlier on, and it was just a lot of effort for things that worked so well in Windows at the time. I think the CoreCLR work and acquiring Xamarin definitely show some work in the right direction here. I've been doing mostly node.js dev for the past few years, may consider .Net again... tbh, more interested in looking at Go for something though, as an excuse to learn. I do miss some niceties with VS though.