4 ms·

Great article -- just the kind of meaty technical content I love seeing here. Also good to know Rust is living up to its goal of being a fully-fledged systems

• freehunter 13y ago
  Agreed. I'd love to see a "build an OS with Rust" tutorial.
  • cmrx64 13y ago
    What would you want to see in such a tutorial? A lot goes into even the most barebones functional operating systems.
    • daniel-levin 13y ago
      I'd go crazy for something along the lines of xv6 [1]. xv6 is a modified Unix V6 that is used to teach the principles of operating systems. Its source code is small and well written. A rust analogue would be awesome [1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html
      • cmrx64 13y ago
        I'll see what I can do
        • codingbinary 13y ago
          Count me in. I'll help with the coding.
  • girvo 13y ago
    I'm more super interesting in diving into EFI! In highschool, I wrote a tiny toy kernel, running solely in 16bit real mode. Quite fun, but I wanted to go further and my knowledge was lacking, although the project did help me learn a lot of ASM. The OP has shown that I could do all sorts of cool stuff going straight into x64 without all the incantations! That's actually super exciting, and makes me hate EFI a little less ;) I'm going to go play, I think! I wonder what Lisp would be the best candidate here...
  • xradionut 13y ago
    I'd rather see Oberon ported to a modern machine. :)
    • pjmlp 13y ago
      Join efforts with the Active Oberon team at ETHZ. http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/ http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/ There are still some students and external guys keeping the ports going. http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/index.php/board,4.0.html http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/index.php/board,4.0.html Nowadays, I think Oberon spirit will live in Rust, D, Go, C#. :)
      • xradionut 13y ago
        Has any of Oberon's "spirit children" been used for a full fledged OS yet?
        • pjmlp 13y ago
          Just kernel level, or partial state projects that were abandoned. D - Xomb - http://wiki.xomb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://wiki.xomb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Go - TinyGo - http://code.google.com/p/tinygo/ http://code.google.com/p/tinygo/ C# - Singularity - http://singularity.codeplex.com/ http://singularity.codeplex.com/, Cosmos - http://cosmos.codeplex.com/ http://cosmos.codeplex.com/ The main problem is lack of support, it is a very big effort to create an OS and it is very easy to turn attention to other stuff. Linux and BSD distributions wouldn't have reached the state they enjoy nowadays, without the help of the existing UNIX toolset and investment of companies interested in seeing the projects succeed.
        • eholk 13y ago
          Responding to pjmlp, a cool project I saw recently that's related to the ones you mentioned is Unikernels [1]. They noticed that a challenge faced by a lot of those projects is hardware support--each OS has to ship with a huge set of drivers to be widely usable. They sidestep this by targeting a VM, which exposes a single hardware interface no matter what it's running on. [1]: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf