It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space. That way, interesting kernels like this one can just comply with that and the enormous amounts of Linux modules can be ported to comply with that standard so that they can also be loaded by redox, blueos,etc..
But the complication I suppose is data-structures being accessed by drivers that reside in the core kernel and other assumptions that come with linking against a monolith program like the Linux kernel. It would be momentous to simply get Linux drivers to comply with a kernel-agnostic ABI.
IMO, the reason we have a sea of open source drivers available now is because of the lack of a standard driver interface.
If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
Similarly, companies will not be incentivized to mainline their drivers for hardware outside of hobbists' interests. We're blessed with a plethora of drivers for enterprise, cloud and industry hardware that would otherwise have never been released beyond vendors' customers' deployments.
What would happen to the Linux driver ecosystem is what happened with Nintendo, Sony, Apple and FreeBSD. You get closed source drivers siloed away in proprietary systems that will never be released. The deployed drivers will come with restrictions on use and distribution, as well, so it wouldn't be like you could pluck out compatible drivers to use elsewhere.
> It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space.
Plan 9 does this but instead of a binary interface that exposes machine details it hides them behind 9P, a simple RPC file tree protocol. This same protocol is also served by user space programs so it's universal. The benefit of all this is the system is small and very light weight. Its an OS a single human can grok from kernel to user space.
Since 9p abstracts everything it's kernel and language agnostic. A Plan 9 kernel can be written in Rust and serve the same 9P tree to a Plan 9 written in C, Go, Zig, D, etc. The user space drivers and services can also be written in any language as well as the programs accessing them. 9P is machine agnostic so a Plan 9 network can be made of disparate machine architectures letting you mix x86, Arm, Power, Mips, Risc-V, etc. Stupid simple cross compiling is an out of the box feature, just change the objtype env variable.
I can export those devices/services to other systems using 9P, cifs, nfs, and so on. I can export the sound device of a Plan 9 machine using cifs to a Windows box and a Windows program could open that file and play sound by writing 16bit stereo audio to it.
Your data structures are then pretty strait forward, e.g audio(3): "Audio data is a sequence of stereo samples, left sample first. Each sample is a 16 bit little-endian two's complement integer; the default sampling rate is 44.1 kHz." http://man.postnix.pw/9front/3/audio
It's a fantastic concept which frees all the services and hardware from the confines of a old school POSIX/Unix machine. Since Plan 9 in NOT Unix you also don't have to worry about crusty old POSIX. It has its own C dialect that is mostly C99 compliant and a very nice C library that beats smelly old ANSI C. I highly recommend learning how it works and giving it a go. Its not for everyone but man, I really dig how its just a patch-bay of networked 9P stuff. Wiring up a network of machines and hardware is ezpz.
Yes, we really really need to do this. It would be what LLVM was for compiler frontends (and thus languages) starting 15-20 years ago: a Cambrian explosion enabler.
I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.
Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia?
Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where there seem to be two worlds not talking to each other much.
I think there might be more of this coming. The era where US was leading everything and expecting everyone to be a good boy who report everything is long gone due to the current state of affairs in the tech world.
I'm not Chinese but I can only support such efforts that make everyone less reliable on main actors. That said they even share their work so it's not like they are going full mute.
> development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.
For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.
> I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English
It's challenging for open source communities in the west to collaborate with their counterparts in China primarily because of language, but also the collaborations can't really happen in the public places that we're all used to. Western social platforms are blocked in China, and Chinese social platforms are not appealing to the west for one reason or another. Even places like Github are frequently blocked on partially inaccessible in China.
So there really just isn't any good place for people to meet and collaborate, and learn from each other.
It's even harder to get an accurate picture of what Chinese companies are actually doing. Like the wiki page for Huawei's OS Next is pretty incredible. By which I mean, rather actually unbelievable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT
They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?
My understanding is that Harmony OS is a full fledge OS at this point. We will start hearing more about it when devs will need to support it for their mobile apps that ship to LATAM and Africa.
From their website (translated): Blue River Operating System 2 is the industry's first operating system written in the Rust language from the kernel to the system framework. A series of security features of the Rust language can detect security vulnerabilities caused by improper memory use during the compilation stage, making it inherently more secure from the source.
notepad0x90|7 months ago
But the complication I suppose is data-structures being accessed by drivers that reside in the core kernel and other assumptions that come with linking against a monolith program like the Linux kernel. It would be momentous to simply get Linux drivers to comply with a kernel-agnostic ABI.
heavyset_go|7 months ago
If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
Similarly, companies will not be incentivized to mainline their drivers for hardware outside of hobbists' interests. We're blessed with a plethora of drivers for enterprise, cloud and industry hardware that would otherwise have never been released beyond vendors' customers' deployments.
What would happen to the Linux driver ecosystem is what happened with Nintendo, Sony, Apple and FreeBSD. You get closed source drivers siloed away in proprietary systems that will never be released. The deployed drivers will come with restrictions on use and distribution, as well, so it wouldn't be like you could pluck out compatible drivers to use elsewhere.
MisterTea|7 months ago
Plan 9 does this but instead of a binary interface that exposes machine details it hides them behind 9P, a simple RPC file tree protocol. This same protocol is also served by user space programs so it's universal. The benefit of all this is the system is small and very light weight. Its an OS a single human can grok from kernel to user space.
Since 9p abstracts everything it's kernel and language agnostic. A Plan 9 kernel can be written in Rust and serve the same 9P tree to a Plan 9 written in C, Go, Zig, D, etc. The user space drivers and services can also be written in any language as well as the programs accessing them. 9P is machine agnostic so a Plan 9 network can be made of disparate machine architectures letting you mix x86, Arm, Power, Mips, Risc-V, etc. Stupid simple cross compiling is an out of the box feature, just change the objtype env variable.
I can export those devices/services to other systems using 9P, cifs, nfs, and so on. I can export the sound device of a Plan 9 machine using cifs to a Windows box and a Windows program could open that file and play sound by writing 16bit stereo audio to it.
Your data structures are then pretty strait forward, e.g audio(3): "Audio data is a sequence of stereo samples, left sample first. Each sample is a 16 bit little-endian two's complement integer; the default sampling rate is 44.1 kHz." http://man.postnix.pw/9front/3/audio
It's a fantastic concept which frees all the services and hardware from the confines of a old school POSIX/Unix machine. Since Plan 9 in NOT Unix you also don't have to worry about crusty old POSIX. It has its own C dialect that is mostly C99 compliant and a very nice C library that beats smelly old ANSI C. I highly recommend learning how it works and giving it a go. Its not for everyone but man, I really dig how its just a patch-bay of networked 9P stuff. Wiring up a network of machines and hardware is ezpz.
Ericson2314|7 months ago
jervant|7 months ago
fithisux|7 months ago
pjmlp|7 months ago
Most other OSes have had driver ABIs throughout all their existence.
StopDisinfo910|7 months ago
Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia?
Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where there seem to be two worlds not talking to each other much.
6r17|7 months ago
I'm not Chinese but I can only support such efforts that make everyone less reliable on main actors. That said they even share their work so it's not like they are going full mute.
AlecSchueler|7 months ago
For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.
VWWHFSfQ|7 months ago
It's challenging for open source communities in the west to collaborate with their counterparts in China primarily because of language, but also the collaborations can't really happen in the public places that we're all used to. Western social platforms are blocked in China, and Chinese social platforms are not appealing to the west for one reason or another. Even places like Github are frequently blocked on partially inaccessible in China.
So there really just isn't any good place for people to meet and collaborate, and learn from each other.
kllrnohj|7 months ago
They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?
Sytten|7 months ago
alidon|7 months ago
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...
megatron2009|7 months ago
mrbluecoat|7 months ago
Beijinger|7 months ago
notfed|7 months ago
pessimizer|7 months ago
https://github.com/vivoblueos/book/blob/main/src/SUMMARY.md
All of these repos are days old.
chillfox|7 months ago
keygenqt|7 months ago
[deleted]
AuthAuth|7 months ago