13 ms·

Mezzanine: A Common Lisp-based 64-bit OS for VirtualBox

193 points by self 12y ago

self 12y ago
It's in its early days, but it has a working compiler, garbage collection, etc. It was announced on the Freenode #lisp channel; start reading at http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:08:33&types=mnaot#1422198513 http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:... Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%202015-01-19%20at%2001.29.31.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%2...
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  Thanks for posting the #lisp chat, it's got some good discussion about the project. I'm surprised how quiet this guy has been for years, don't ever seem to remember seeing him in IRC!
  - pekk 12y ago
    The correlation between strength of IRC presence and productivity is, shall we say, imperfect...
    - desdiv 12y ago
      I'd say there's a pretty strong negative correlation ;)
- avodonosov 12y ago
  how about a small video screencast?
  - tempodox 12y ago
    No, please no video! Written instructions are much better.
    - avodonosov 12y ago
      I don't mean a screancast how to install it. I just want to avoid installation and see how it looks.
- chrisdone 12y ago
  Also available in ircbrowse form: http://ircbrowse.net/browse/lisp?id=8939107&events_per_page=100&timestamp=1422198513#t1422198513 http://ircbrowse.net/browse/lisp?id=8939107&events_per_page=...
rasur 12y ago
Nice! Please do alert us when it appears on github. I'm sure there will be interest. EDIT: In fact if you can announce your github id now/soon people can start watching in earnest.
jacquesm 12y ago
I like this. There is strength in having many different species of operating system. Monocultures are vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, one way to combat that is to have a (much) larger variety of operating systems so that infecting any of them has a very low return-on-investment. So any new operating system that is far from the beaten path should be very much welcomed, this one is more interesting than most since it is written using a high level language. Looking forward to an eventual release.
- contingencies 12y ago
  Begs the question: is it possible to write a Lisp-based escape from the Lisp VM to the Virtualbox VM, then an escape from the Virtualbox VM to the host OS? Perhaps, but not something a casual attacker is likely to have resources for ;)
  - cpach 12y ago
    Wouldn’t this possibility depend on security holes in Virtualbox rather than in the guest OS?
    - thecatspaw 12y ago
      It would depend on both.
      - cpach 12y ago
        But if there are security holes in Virtualbox, wouldn’t they be exploitable by any OS, regardless of what language it was written in?
        tedunangst 12y ago
        Yes. The relevance depends on how likely you are to run a virtualbox image you found on the Internet because somebody told you "run this image".
      - 12y ago
auvi 12y ago
Awesome! I just downloaded the vm disk and the system is up and running inside VirtualBox. It was good to see the CL-USER> prompt.
avodonosov 12y ago
A video screencast is welcome!
- tempodox 12y ago
  A better elaboration on the written instructions would even be much more welcome than a video. Video screen casts are vastly overrated.
  - avodonosov 12y ago
    I don't mean a screancast how to install it. I just want to avoid installation and see how it looks.
    - tempodox 12y ago
      If I could misread that, so could everyone else :)
    - tempodox 12y ago
      If I could misread that, so could everyone else :)
pmoriarty 12y ago
Copy of install instructions here: http://okturing.com/src/2648/body http://okturing.com/src/2648/body Also might as well copy them here too: 1) Install VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org/ 2) Download and ungzip the disk image from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Mezzanine%20Demo%201-disk1.vmdk.gz 3) Create a new VM in VirtualBox with the following settings: Type: Other Version: Other/Unknown 64-bit Memory size: 512MB Use an existing virtual hard drive file, the one you downloaded 4) Open the settings for the VM and switch to the Network tab. 5) Open the advanced settings and change the adapter type to virtio-net 6) Click OK. The VM is ready to start.
- falcolas 12y ago
  Interesting that they need the virtio-net adapter (host hands off raw network packets to the guest instead of simulating a network card). How many other low level drivers are missing? Of course, for a toy OS it doesn't really matter, but it does unfortunately constrain this to the toy OS category.
  - iso-8859-1 12y ago
    Why do you think virtualized == toy? Is MirageOS a toy too then? They have no chance of ever getting enough device drivers to be able to support all the hardware out there. Running virtualized makes sense, and it's not a big performance hit.
    - kazinator 12y ago
      A possible reason why "virtualized == toy" is that the virtualized system simulates certain specific hardware. The OS provides drivers for that hardware. But it hasn't been validated on the real hardware. We don't know whether that is the case here. If the authors get a real box that has the same peripherals as the VirtualBox, and bring the OS up on that, then this "toy" argument can no longer be made, in any case.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    Heh. If you think "only runs in a VM" and "toy" are synonyms, you need a history lesson. Back in the 1960s, one of the hot new things from IBM (you know, the company that wins on Jeopardy) was VM/CMS. VM is a VM, hence the imaginative name, and CMS stood for Conversational Monitor System, originally Cambridge Monitor System, for reasons I'll let you figure out. Conversational meant "has a command line", as opposed to batch, which you might have heard of. CMS was, all told, somewhere between pond scum and MS-DOS on the complexity scale: it provided some APIs for applications, but didn't handle memory protection, multitasking, multiple users, or security policy. A mainframe running CMS on the bare metal would have been a really expensive version of a PC from twenty or so years later; obviously, you can only justify doing that in a Serious University. However, it was convenient and user-friendly back before the term was coined, when that meant "not seeing raw machine code unless you asked for it", so the gag was to run multiple instances of CMS as guests under VM, which provided everything CMS didn't. Every user got their own copy of the OS, and the single physical mainframe was turned into dozens or hundreds of virtual mainframes by VM. My punchline: As the decades wore on, CMS was never modified to take newer hardware into account. Why would it be? It never ran on the bare metal. VM gained emulation functionality, CMS grew to depend on that, and now CMS is effectively an appendage of VM, a friendly face to the thing which does all the hard work. You know, like marketing, or upper management.
tedunangst 12y ago
Are people up voting this because they like the title or they like the link? Because there's literally more information about what this is in the HN title than the link. Is an anonymous paste the closest this thing has to a homepage?
- blfr 12y ago
  It's funny how little infrastructure some projects can get away with. Many Android ROMs only have a thread on XDA and a file on Google Drive.
- thecatspaw 12y ago
  apparently the link has been changed. when I clicked it, it went to a website with some information and a few screenshots. edit: here's the screenshot (from another comment): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%202015-01-19%20at%2001.29.31.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%2...
- jacquesm 12y ago
  There was more content previously (but no install instructions). The submission reminded me of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126818 Here is an IRC log about it: http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:08:33&types=mnaot#1422198513 http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:...
kermitdance 12y ago
Sounds cool but I'm kind of reluctant to run a VBox only described by a pastebin-like bit of text. Does anyone else think that way?
- cpach 12y ago
  I agree :)
mark_l_watson 12y ago
This looks very cool. I am going to wait until the source is posted on github before trying it. I was lucky enough to have received a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine in the early 1980s, so having an OS written in Lisp seems reasonable :-) Also, I agree with jacquesm's comment on the advantages of many operating systems.
nemoniac 12y ago
So what needs to happen to run this on the bare metal with stumpwm and emacs on top?
- ahknight 12y ago
  Pretty much everything.
muminoff 12y ago
No issue with naming? I mean there is already an open-source project named Mezzanine, but it is CMS built with Django. http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ http://mezzanine.jupo.org/
tempodox 12y ago
I don't know VirtualBox that well, the instructions in the post are unclear to me and don't work. Could someone elaborate this for VB-dummies like me? Edit: Especially unclear is “Use an existing virtual hard drive file, the one you downloaded”. How do I do that?
- raphaelss 12y ago
  The .vmdk file you get after running gunzip on the downloaded file is a virtual hard drive. When you create a new VM in VirtualBox, it asks if you want to create a new virtual hard drive or use an existing one. Select the one downloaded.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    Yep, got it. I didn't recognize that funny graphic beside the pop-up menu in VirtualBox was supposed to be a button for opening a file. Creative UI choices like that do confuse me a great deal.
crististm 12y ago
Now this is looks pretty nice and I'd like it to take off. It can be the next Lisp Machine but unfortunately it raises a red flag with the licensing terms - MIT. The author distributed the binary without the source code which is fine with MIT. He might release the code or change his mind and never release it. Again this is his choice. But at this point, the distributed image is not any different than a proprietary solution. What good is it for me if I can't change it? No flame-wars please.
dmytrish 12y ago
I've been pleasantly surprised with its slick UI. But, as with many Lisp OS images, there is an issue with explorability: how do I discover system commands in the REPL? I know a bit of Common Lisp, but it's not clear to me how to discover what system can and what not, how to explore the environment. Neither Filesystem Viewer provides any clues, nor does REPL.
htor 12y ago
This is good work! I seriously _need_ to see the source code. Always wanted to make an OS in a high level language.
mgsouth 12y ago
It's up on github (name changed to Mezzano because of the conflict with the CMS project): https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano IRC log discussing building: http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?from=2015-01-27T19%3A00%3A00&to=2015-01-28T00%3A00%3A00&type%5B%5D=m&type%5B%5D=a&type%5B%5D=n&type%5B%5D=p&type%5B%5D=o&type%5B%5D=t http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?from=2015-01-27T19%3A...

193 points by self 12y ago

self 12y ago

It's in its early days, but it has a working compiler, garbage collection, etc. It was announced on the Freenode #lisp channel; start reading at http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:08:33&types=mnaot#1422198513 http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:... Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%202015-01-19%20at%2001.29.31.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%2...

orthecreedence 12y ago
Thanks for posting the #lisp chat, it's got some good discussion about the project. I'm surprised how quiet this guy has been for years, don't ever seem to remember seeing him in IRC!
- pekk 12y ago
  The correlation between strength of IRC presence and productivity is, shall we say, imperfect...
  - desdiv 12y ago
    I'd say there's a pretty strong negative correlation ;)
avodonosov 12y ago
how about a small video screencast?
- tempodox 12y ago
  No, please no video! Written instructions are much better.
  - avodonosov 12y ago
    I don't mean a screancast how to install it. I just want to avoid installation and see how it looks.
chrisdone 12y ago
Also available in ircbrowse form: http://ircbrowse.net/browse/lisp?id=8939107&events_per_page=100&timestamp=1422198513#t1422198513 http://ircbrowse.net/browse/lisp?id=8939107&events_per_page=...

rasur 12y ago

Nice! Please do alert us when it appears on github. I'm sure there will be interest. EDIT: In fact if you can announce your github id now/soon people can start watching in earnest.

jacquesm 12y ago

I like this. There is strength in having many different species of operating system. Monocultures are vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, one way to combat that is to have a (much) larger variety of operating systems so that infecting any of them has a very low return-on-investment. So any new operating system that is far from the beaten path should be very much welcomed, this one is more interesting than most since it is written using a high level language. Looking forward to an eventual release.

contingencies 12y ago
Begs the question: is it possible to write a Lisp-based escape from the Lisp VM to the Virtualbox VM, then an escape from the Virtualbox VM to the host OS? Perhaps, but not something a casual attacker is likely to have resources for ;)
- cpach 12y ago
  Wouldn’t this possibility depend on security holes in Virtualbox rather than in the guest OS?
  - thecatspaw 12y ago
    It would depend on both.
    - cpach 12y ago
      But if there are security holes in Virtualbox, wouldn’t they be exploitable by any OS, regardless of what language it was written in?
      - tedunangst 12y ago
        Yes. The relevance depends on how likely you are to run a virtualbox image you found on the Internet because somebody told you "run this image".
    - 12y ago

auvi 12y ago

Awesome! I just downloaded the vm disk and the system is up and running inside VirtualBox. It was good to see the CL-USER> prompt.

avodonosov 12y ago

A video screencast is welcome!

tempodox 12y ago
A better elaboration on the written instructions would even be much more welcome than a video. Video screen casts are vastly overrated.
- avodonosov 12y ago
  I don't mean a screancast how to install it. I just want to avoid installation and see how it looks.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    If I could misread that, so could everyone else :)
  - tempodox 12y ago
    If I could misread that, so could everyone else :)

pmoriarty 12y ago

Copy of install instructions here: http://okturing.com/src/2648/body http://okturing.com/src/2648/body Also might as well copy them here too: 1) Install VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org/ 2) Download and ungzip the disk image from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Mezzanine%20Demo%201-disk1.vmdk.gz 3) Create a new VM in VirtualBox with the following settings: Type: Other Version: Other/Unknown 64-bit Memory size: 512MB Use an existing virtual hard drive file, the one you downloaded 4) Open the settings for the VM and switch to the Network tab. 5) Open the advanced settings and change the adapter type to virtio-net 6) Click OK. The VM is ready to start.

falcolas 12y ago
Interesting that they need the virtio-net adapter (host hands off raw network packets to the guest instead of simulating a network card). How many other low level drivers are missing? Of course, for a toy OS it doesn't really matter, but it does unfortunately constrain this to the toy OS category.
- iso-8859-1 12y ago
  Why do you think virtualized == toy? Is MirageOS a toy too then? They have no chance of ever getting enough device drivers to be able to support all the hardware out there. Running virtualized makes sense, and it's not a big performance hit.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    A possible reason why "virtualized == toy" is that the virtualized system simulates certain specific hardware. The OS provides drivers for that hardware. But it hasn't been validated on the real hardware. We don't know whether that is the case here. If the authors get a real box that has the same peripherals as the VirtualBox, and bring the OS up on that, then this "toy" argument can no longer be made, in any case.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  Heh. If you think "only runs in a VM" and "toy" are synonyms, you need a history lesson. Back in the 1960s, one of the hot new things from IBM (you know, the company that wins on Jeopardy) was VM/CMS. VM is a VM, hence the imaginative name, and CMS stood for Conversational Monitor System, originally Cambridge Monitor System, for reasons I'll let you figure out. Conversational meant "has a command line", as opposed to batch, which you might have heard of. CMS was, all told, somewhere between pond scum and MS-DOS on the complexity scale: it provided some APIs for applications, but didn't handle memory protection, multitasking, multiple users, or security policy. A mainframe running CMS on the bare metal would have been a really expensive version of a PC from twenty or so years later; obviously, you can only justify doing that in a Serious University. However, it was convenient and user-friendly back before the term was coined, when that meant "not seeing raw machine code unless you asked for it", so the gag was to run multiple instances of CMS as guests under VM, which provided everything CMS didn't. Every user got their own copy of the OS, and the single physical mainframe was turned into dozens or hundreds of virtual mainframes by VM. My punchline: As the decades wore on, CMS was never modified to take newer hardware into account. Why would it be? It never ran on the bare metal. VM gained emulation functionality, CMS grew to depend on that, and now CMS is effectively an appendage of VM, a friendly face to the thing which does all the hard work. You know, like marketing, or upper management.

tedunangst 12y ago

Are people up voting this because they like the title or they like the link? Because there's literally more information about what this is in the HN title than the link. Is an anonymous paste the closest this thing has to a homepage?

blfr 12y ago
It's funny how little infrastructure some projects can get away with. Many Android ROMs only have a thread on XDA and a file on Google Drive.
thecatspaw 12y ago
apparently the link has been changed. when I clicked it, it went to a website with some information and a few screenshots. edit: here's the screenshot (from another comment): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%202015-01-19%20at%2001.29.31.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46753018/Screen%20Shot%2...
jacquesm 12y ago
There was more content previously (but no install instructions). The submission reminded me of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126818 Here is an IRC log about it: http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:08:33&types=mnaot#1422198513 http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?around=2015-01-25T15:...

kermitdance 12y ago

Sounds cool but I'm kind of reluctant to run a VBox only described by a pastebin-like bit of text. Does anyone else think that way?

cpach 12y ago
I agree :)

mark_l_watson 12y ago

This looks very cool. I am going to wait until the source is posted on github before trying it. I was lucky enough to have received a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine in the early 1980s, so having an OS written in Lisp seems reasonable :-) Also, I agree with jacquesm's comment on the advantages of many operating systems.

nemoniac 12y ago

So what needs to happen to run this on the bare metal with stumpwm and emacs on top?

ahknight 12y ago
Pretty much everything.

muminoff 12y ago

No issue with naming? I mean there is already an open-source project named Mezzanine, but it is CMS built with Django. http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

tempodox 12y ago

I don't know VirtualBox that well, the instructions in the post are unclear to me and don't work. Could someone elaborate this for VB-dummies like me? Edit: Especially unclear is “Use an existing virtual hard drive file, the one you downloaded”. How do I do that?

raphaelss 12y ago
The .vmdk file you get after running gunzip on the downloaded file is a virtual hard drive. When you create a new VM in VirtualBox, it asks if you want to create a new virtual hard drive or use an existing one. Select the one downloaded.
- tempodox 12y ago
  Yep, got it. I didn't recognize that funny graphic beside the pop-up menu in VirtualBox was supposed to be a button for opening a file. Creative UI choices like that do confuse me a great deal.

crististm 12y ago

Now this is looks pretty nice and I'd like it to take off. It can be the next Lisp Machine but unfortunately it raises a red flag with the licensing terms - MIT. The author distributed the binary without the source code which is fine with MIT. He might release the code or change his mind and never release it. Again this is his choice. But at this point, the distributed image is not any different than a proprietary solution. What good is it for me if I can't change it? No flame-wars please.

dmytrish 12y ago

I've been pleasantly surprised with its slick UI. But, as with many Lisp OS images, there is an issue with explorability: how do I discover system commands in the REPL? I know a bit of Common Lisp, but it's not clear to me how to discover what system can and what not, how to explore the environment. Neither Filesystem Viewer provides any clues, nor does REPL.

htor 12y ago

This is good work! I seriously _need_ to see the source code. Always wanted to make an OS in a high level language.

mgsouth 12y ago

It's up on github (name changed to Mezzano because of the conflict with the CMS project): https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano IRC log discussing building: http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?from=2015-01-27T19%3A00%3A00&to=2015-01-28T00%3A00%3A00&type%5B%5D=m&type%5B%5D=a&type%5B%5D=n&type%5B%5D=p&type%5B%5D=o&type%5B%5D=t http://log.irc.tymoon.eu/freenode/lisp?from=2015-01-27T19%3A...