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Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

364 points| Klasiaster | 1 year ago |github.com

224 comments

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akira2501|1 year ago

I personally dislike rust, but I love kernels, and so I'll always check these projects out.

This is one of the nicer ones.

It looks pretty conservative in it's use of Rust's advanced features. The code looks pretty easy to read and follow. There's actually a decent amount of comments (for rust code).

Not bad!

wg0|1 year ago

Otherwise is a decent language but what makes it difficult is the borrow semantics and lifetimes. Lifetimes are more complicated to get your head around.

But then there's this Arc, Ref, Pinning and what not - how deep is that rabbit hole?

IshKebab|1 year ago

Rust code is usually well commented in my experience.

justmarc|1 year ago

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security.

The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware.

I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of hardware as well as network support, and use a sort of Rust OS/abstraction layer for the rest, bypassing or simply not using the originally booted kernel for all user land specific stuff.

nijave|1 year ago

Couldn't you just boot the Linux kernel directly and launch a generic app as pid 1 instead of a full blown init system with a bunch of daemons?

That's basically what you're getting with Docker containers and a shared kernel. AWS Lambda is doing something similar with dedicated kernels with Firecracker VMs

cgh|1 year ago

If you want truly high-performance networking, you can bypass the kernel altogether with DPDK. So you don't have to worry about alternative kernels for other tasks at all. On the downside, DPDK takes over the NIC entirely, removing the kernel from the equation, so if you need the kernel to see network traffic for some reason, it won't work for you.

You can check out hardware support here: https://core.dpdk.org/supported/nics/

protoman3000|1 year ago

Why don’t you just use a SmartNIC and P4? It won’t get faster than running on the NIC itself

tiffanyh|1 year ago

OT: if you're interested in Asterinas, you might also be interested in Redox (entire OS written in Rust).

https://www.redox-os.org/

DoctorOW|1 year ago

I love Redox as a project because while it still has a massive ways to go, it's the closest to being a new OS/Kernel that has the potential to make it to a viable daily driver. Windows/MacOS/Unix/Linux are all incredibly old by software standards and Redox is bringing some cool design decisions.

metaketa|1 year ago

This is fascinating! Couldn't really find the kernel code but would love to know more about the applicability. I'm curious since seeing the Unikraft release that promised millisecond container boot times

snvzz|1 year ago

Redox has a proper architecture, aka microkernel multiserver.

Thus it is a much more interesting project.

exabrial|1 year ago

I think this looks incredible. Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_??? Wow!

> utilize the more productive Rust programming language

Nitpick: it’s 2024 and these ‘more productive’ comparisons are silly, completely unscientific, And a bit of a red flag for your project: The most productive language for a developer is the one they understand what is happening one layer below the level of abstraction they are working with. Unless you’re comparing something rating Ruby vs RiscV assembly, it’s just hocus-pocus.

jmmv|1 year ago

> I think this looks incredible. Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_??? Wow!

FWIW that’s what the Linux compatibility layer in the BSDs does and also what WSL 1 did (https://jmmv.dev/2020/11/wsl-lost-potential.html).

It’s hard to get _everything_ perfectly right but not that difficult to get most of it working.

dathinab|1 year ago

Idk. Asahi Linux GPU driver breaks all "common sense" of "how fast a reliable usable feature rich driver" was produced by a small 3rd party team.

The company I work for has both rust and python projects (through partially pre "reasonable python type linting" using mypy and co.) and the general consensus there is "overall" rust is noticeable more productive (and stable in usage/reliable), especially if you have code which changes a lot.

A company I worked previous for had used rust in the very early days (around 1.0 days) and had one of this "let's throw up a huge prototype code base in a matter of days and then rewrite it later" (basically 90% of code had huge tech dept). But that code base stuck around way longer then intended, caused way less issues then expected. I had to maintain it a bit and in my experience with similar code in Python and Js (and a bit Jave) I expected it to be very painful but surprisingly it wasn't, like at all.

Similar comparing my experience massive time wastes due to having to debug soundness/UB issues in Rust, with experiences in C/C++ it's again way more productive.

So as long as you don't do bad stuff like over obsessing with the type system everything in my experience tells me using Rust is more productive (for many tasks, definitely not all task, there are some really grate frameworks doing a ton of work for you in some languages against which the rust ecosystem atm. can't compete).

---

> Most productive language for a developer is the one they understand what is happening one layer below the level of abstraction they are working with.

I strongly disagree, the most productive language is the one where the developer doesn't have to care much about what happens in a layer below in most cases. At least as long as you don't want obsess over micro optimizations not being worth the time and opportunity cost they come with for most companies/use cases.

kelnos|1 year ago

> Like how does one create a compatible abi _for all of linux_???

You look at Linux's syscall table[0], read through the documentation to figure out the arguments, data types, flags, return values, etc., and then implement that in your kernel. The Linux ABI is just its "library" interface to userspace.

It's probably not that difficult; writing the rest of the kernel itself is more challenging, and, frankly, more interesting. Certainly matching behavior and semantics can be tricky sometimes, I'm sure. And I wouldn't be surprised if the initial implementation of some things (like io_uring, for example, if it's even supported yet) might be primitive and poorly optimized, or might even use other syscalls to do their work.

But it's doable. While Linux's internal ABI is unstable, the syscall interface is sacred. One of Torvalds' golden rules is you don't break userspace.

[0] https://filippo.io/linux-syscall-table/

ozgrakkurt|1 year ago

Everyone says what they are used to is better or more productive. Even in assembly vs ruby, some stuff are much easier in assembly and maybe impossible in ruby afaik

pjmlp|1 year ago

Besides all examples, Microsoft is now using TockOS for Pluton firmware, another Rust based OS.

https://tockos.org/

treeshateorcs|1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AQ5lpXujGo Asterinas: A safe Rust-based OS kernel for TEE by H. Tian & C. Song (Ant Group & Intel) | OC3 2024

gghh|1 year ago

Exactly. I see elsewhere in this page people comparing this project to Linus Torvalds starting an OS in his dorm room while studying CS. Like these were "young and clueless" devs writing an OS for fun.

From the looks of it, this seems like a serious corporate backed project made by employees of the Ant Group, the chinese fintech giant. A more fair comparison would be with Google's Fuchsia OS (defunct) or Huawei's HarmonyOS. It may succeed, it may fail, but it's nothing like a couple of kids doing a passion project to learn Rust.

hkalbasi|1 year ago

> In the framekernel OS architecture, the entire OS resides in the same address space (like a monolithic kernel) and is required to be written in Rust. However, there's a twist---the kernel is partitioned in two halves ... the unprivileged Services must be written exclusively in safe Rust.

Unprivileged services can exploit known compiler bugs and do anything they want in safe Rust. How this affects their security model?

rcxdude|1 year ago

I think it's not so much intended as a "you can allow arbitrary untrusted code to run as an unprivileged service" and more "a buggy unprivileged service won't compromise the whole system".

Klasiaster|1 year ago

There was also the similar project Kerla¹ but development stalled. Recently people argued that instead of focusing on Rust-for-Linux it would be easier to create a drop-in replacement like these two. I wonder if there are enough people interested to make this happen as a sustained project.

¹ https://github.com/nuta/kerla/

kelnos|1 year ago

> Recently people argued that instead of focusing on Rust-for-Linux it would be easier to create a drop-in replacement like these two

I guess it depends on what they mean by "easy". Certainly it's easier in the sense that you can just write code all day long, and not have to deal with the politics about Rust inside Linux, or deal with all the existing C interfaces, finding ways to wrap them in Rust in good, useful ways that leverage Rust's strengths but don't make it harder to evolve those C interfaces without trouble on the Rust side.

But the bulk of Linux is device drivers. You can build a kernel in Rust (like Asterinas) that can run all of a regular Linux userland without recompilation, and I imagine it's maybe not even that difficult to do so. But Asterinas only runs on x86_64 VMs right now, and won't run on real hardware. Getting to the point where it could -- especially on modern hardware -- might take years. Supporting all the architectures and various bits of hardware that Linux supports could take decades. I suppose limiting themselves to three or four architectures, and only supporting hardware made more recently could cut that down. But still, it's a daunting project.

depressedpanda|1 year ago

From the README:

> Currently, Asterinas only supports x86-64 VMs. However, our aim for 2024 is to make Asterinas production-ready on x86-64 VMs.

I'm confused.

wrs|1 year ago

I think it’s “Currently, Asterinas only supports x86-64 VMs. However, [rather than working on additional architectures this year,] our aim for 2024 is to make Asterinas production-ready on x86-64 VMs.”

favorited|1 year ago

Sounds like their goal is to improve their x86-64 support before implementing other ISAs.

nurb|1 year ago

It's clearer from the book roadmap:

> By 2024, we aim to achieve production-ready status for VM environments on x86-64. > In 2025 and beyond, we will expand our support for CPU architectures and hardware devices.

https://asterinas.github.io/book/kernel/roadmap.html

netbsdusers|1 year ago

They lack essential things for a kernel that could be used in production, viz. not kernel panicing during out-of-memory conditions, not an easy thing to retrofit when you have designed without consideration of it. It will probably take a bit more than 2 and a half months to rectify that.

https://github.com/asterinas/asterinas/issues/669

None4U|1 year ago

Distinction here is between "supports" and "production-ready on", not "x86-64" and "x86-64"

convolvatron|1 year ago

it would be nice to know how much userspace it supports. supporting the dynamic loader, reasonable futexes, epoll, signals, uring are all big milestones

MattPalmer1086|1 year ago

Yeah, I had to read that a few times... I think they just mean it isn't production ready yet, but that's what they are aiming for.

valunord|1 year ago

I like what they're working towards with V in Vinix as well. Exciting times to see such things with ABI compat with Linux opening new paradigms.

cryptonector|1 year ago

> Linux-compatible ABI

There's no specification of that ABI, much less a compliance test suite. How complete is this compatibility?

phlip9|1 year ago

Super cool project. Looks like the short-term target use-case is running a Linux-compatible OS in an Intel TDX guest VM with a significantly safer and smaller TCB. Makes sense. This way you also postpone a lot of the HW driver development drudgery and instead only target VM devices.

spease|1 year ago

What’s the intended use case for this? Backend containers?

Animats|1 year ago

Makes a lot of sense for virtual machine containers. Inside a container inside a VM, you need far less operating system.

wg0|1 year ago

Side question - I have always wondered how a Linux system is configured at the lowest level?

Let's take example of network. There's IP address, gateway, DNS, routes etc. Depending on distribution we might see something like netplan reading config files and then calling ABI functions?

Or Linux kernel directly also reads some config files? Probably not...

NewJazz|1 year ago

Linux kernel as much as possible tries not to parse or read external data (besides stuff like acpi tables, device trees, hardware registers). For networking, you might look at the iproute codebase to see how they do things like bring a network device up, or create a bridge device, add a route, et cetera.

Edit: looks like iproute2 uses NETLINK, but non-networking tools might use syscalls or device ioctls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlink

wiz21c|1 year ago

> Linux-compatible ABI

Does it mean it can re-use the drivers written for hardware to run with linux ?

eptcyka|1 year ago

No. The drivers in Linux are kernel modules, most often in-tree - meaning that the source for the drivers is built along the rest of the kernel source code. Most hardware drivers depend on various common kernel structures that change often - when they do, the source for drivers is fixed practically in the same git branch. There is no driver ABI to speak of.

dezgeg|1 year ago

No. There is no stable ABI nor API for in-kernel device drivers.

apatheticonion|1 year ago

I wish I could work on this as my paid day job.

As soon as I can financially retire, I'll make contributing to this my full time job!

hulitu|1 year ago

> Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

> Currently, Asterinas only supports x86-64 VMs.

So no real hardware.

delduca|1 year ago

This is exactly what I was discussing with a friend who works on the kernel. I don’t think Rust should be supported; the kernel should remain in C. Instead, a completely new kernel in Rust should be created with API/ABI compatibility with the original kernel.

apatheticonion|1 year ago

Shame about the lack of a stable kernel driver ABI/API in Linux otherwise this kernel could inherent a lot of drivers.

xiaodai|1 year ago

Lol. I am Malaysian Chinese but I honestly don't think anyone will put into production a Chinese made kernel. The risk is too high, same as no one will use a Linux distro coming out of Russian, Iran or NK. It's just cultural bias in the west.

edelbitter|1 year ago

Its not the Chinese words that scare me. It the English "safety" and "security" referring to specific properties and concepts... but wildly different ones between sentences. Like its all 2009 again and we are hoping we avoided XSS when we picked the appropriate quote/encode/escape method.

gpm|1 year ago

Supposing it caught on... which do you think is riskier? Running an OS written in mostly memory safe code that somewhat might have tried to slip a backdoor in, or running an OS written in mostly memory unsafe code that has a long history of vulnerabilities and the Chinese almost certainly know about a vulnerability in.

If this catches on and has generally been subject to significant third party code review with positive results, I'm not sure any backdoor is lower cost to use than an equivalent linux vulnerability. To be fair, I'm not sure it isn't either.

throw4950sh06|1 year ago

You're wrong. A lot of Chinese code and hardware is in production in the west. Huawei networking hardware is widespread, for example.

jackhalford|1 year ago

The building process happens in a container?

> If everything goes well, Asterinas is now up and running inside a VM.

Seems like the developers are very confident about it too

fithisux|1 year ago

Now we need Rust Windows compatible kernel to save us from Recall.

rpgraham84|1 year ago

oh cool, now I can have an unverifiable kernel from a team in China

weinzierl|1 year ago

Decades ago Linus Torvalds was asked in an interview if he feared Linux to be replaced by something new. His answer was that some day someone young and hungry would come along, but unless they liked writing device drivers Linux would be safe.

This is all paraphrased from my memory, so take it with a grain of salt. I think the gist of it is still valid: Projects like Asterinas are interesting and have a place, but they will not replace Linux as we have it today.

(Asterinas, from what I understood, doesn't claim to replace Linux, but it a common expectation.)

loeg|1 year ago

More recently, in a similar vein:

> Torvalds seemed optimistic that "some clueless young person will decide 'how hard can it be?'" and start their own operating system in Rust or some other language. If they keep at it "for many, many decades", they may get somewhere; "I am looking forward to seeing that". Hohndel clarified that by "clueless", Torvalds was referring to his younger self; "Oh, absolutely, yeah, you have to be all kinds of stupid to say 'I can do this'", he said to more laughter. He could not have done it without the "literally tens of thousands of other people"; the "only reason I ever started was that I didn't know how hard it would be, but that's what makes it fun".

https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/

mdhb|1 year ago

Also this mysterious new Fuchsia OS from Google is also shooting for full Linux compatibility and is about to show up in Android, I think this is a much more realistic path of the next generation of operating systems that have a real chance to replace Linux but who knows what their actual plans are here at the moment but I don’t believe for a moment that that project is dead in any way.

linsomniac|1 year ago

I feel like there's a potentially large audience for a kernel that targets running in a VM. For a lot of workloads, a simple VM kernel could be a win.

GoblinSlayer|1 year ago

Just ask an AI to riir linux drivers. Anybody tried it?

havaker|1 year ago

The license choice is explained with the following:

> [...] we accommodate the business need for proprietary kernel modules. Unlike GPL, the MPL permits the linking of MPL-covered files with proprietary code.

Glancing at the readme, it also looks like they are treating it as a big feature:

> Asterinas surpasses Linux in terms of developer friendliness. It empowers kernel developers to [...] choose between releasing their kernel modules as open source or keeping them proprietary, thanks to the flexibility offered by MPL.

Can't wait to glue some proprietary blobs to this new, secure rust kernel /s

yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago

I'm curious about the practical aspect: Are they going to freeze a stable driver ABI, or are they going to break proprietary drivers from time to time?

prmoustache|1 year ago

> docker run -it --privileged --network=host --device=/dev/kvm -v $(pwd)/asterinas:/root/asterinas asterinas/asterinas:0.9.3

Is that the new generation of curl | bashism in action?

oefrha|1 year ago

Hardly different from downloading random binary installers and executing them. Or random source distributions and (sudo) make install. Or npm/pip/cargo/etc. install random packages. Before anyone mentions distros and package managers, as a former team member of a major package manager I can assure you we don’t vet shit beyond project notability, and new versions are accepted semi-automatically. We’ll yank something after the fact if you report a malicious update, sure.

curl | bash has an actual problem: potential execution of an incomplete script (which can be mitigated with function calling). And there’s the mostly theoretical problem of the server being pwned / sending malicious code just to you (which of course also applies to any other unsigned channel). Arbitrary code execution is never a problem unique to it, but people dunk on it all the time because they saw another person dunking on it in the past.

wslh|1 year ago

Is the "--privileged" option ironic here? The project is very interesting, but it feels a bit pedantic, especially when emphasizing Rust's safety features while downplaying Linux. At the same time, it seems they're not fully applying those principles themselves, which makes it feel like they're not quite 'eating their own lunch'.

sylware|1 year ago

Linux is mostly a decades long maintained repository of real hardware programing code, and written in mostly simple "kernel" 'C', not some ultra complex syntax language (unfortunately, it has been tied to compiler specific extensions or "modern C" tantrums, _generic for instance).

Have a look at AMD GPU driver. Massive, and full of 'stabilization/work around' code... happening all the time, for years.

I guess, the real "first thing first" is to design hardware, performant hardware on latest silicon process , with a, as simple as possible, modern, standard and stable hardware programing interface. Because, for many types of hardware, 'now we know how to do it properly' (command hardware ring buffers usually, or a good compromise for modern CPU architecture, like RISC-V).

Another angle of "cleanup", I guess it would be the removal of many of the C compiler extension (or "modern C") tantrums from linux, or at least proper alternatives with not-inline assembly to allow small and alternative compilers to step in.

Personally, I tend to write rv64 assembly (which I interpret on x86_64), but for the userland. If I code C, I push towards mostly "simple and plain C99".

The more I think about it, the more I get the following coming to my mind: 'hardware with simple standard interfaces' and standard assembly for the kernel.

artemonster|1 year ago

Huh? What is this nonsense?? Are you suggesting that you like to write practical-oriented, simple and working solutions instead of yak shaving half a day at perfecting ridiculous type signatures, removing „unsafe“ code and satisfying borrow checker? Proposterous! /s