.NET framework ported to NetBSD

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/pull/4504/files

by nbyouri • 10 years ago

263 38 10 years ago

github.com

CiPHPerCoder• 10 years ago

Can I be the first to call it .NETBSD?

draw_down• 10 years ago

How about "Net-Net"

stephengillie• 10 years ago

Net.NET

nbyouri• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Super helpful explanation & context. Thank you

callinyouin• 10 years 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• 10 years 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

saosebastiao• 10 years ago

How is the rump kernel any different than a unikernel?

ihsw• 10 years 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

bri3d• 10 years ago

The rump kernel can be used as the basis of a unikernel (see: Rumprun). But, the rump kernel theoretically has applications beyond just use in a unikernel, by providing a common, documented API on one end and hypercall interface on the other which (in theory) enables robust driver and application portability even when used in "traditional" userland / full-OS environment.

So, in short, a rump kernel is a building block that can be used to build a unikernel, but the rump kernel can also be used in other contexts as well.

sedachv• 10 years ago

Think of rump kernels as a portable library of drivers with a well-specified API.

What is unique about NetBSD is that they have been structuring their driver code on top of well-specified portable APIs inside the kernel (AFAIK beginning with bus_space in NetBSD 1.2 in 1996: http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?bus_space++NetBSD-curre...). At first this was to increase portability by making it possible to write a single device driver that would work on different architectures and over different buses (contrast to Linux, where you basically have to write a new driver for the same device over PCI vs USB).

Having these well-specified API layers is what makes it easy to take the NetBSD drivers and use them outside of the NetBSD kernel, which is what rump does. This makes it possible to write and debug drivers in NetBSD userspace (and run them too, there are proposals that are essentially steering NetBSD into a microkernel: https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/userland_pci/). You can also implement the NetBSD APIs that the drivers use in your own kernel and run the NetBSD drivers.

There was a similar project for Linux drivers (DDEKit: http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/ddekit/) but the ad-hoc nature of how Linux device drivers interact with the rest of the Linux kernel and the major changes across different Linux versions make such a project much harder to use and keep current.

coredog64• 10 years ago

Also worth mentioning that only supported arch right now is arm64. Don't get too excited about running a .NET rump kernel on your evbarm toaster.

floatboth4• 10 years ago

amd64, not arm64. Do get excited about running a .NET rump kernel on your Xen host!

kingmanaz• 10 years 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. ).

iamabhi92• 10 years ago

Great work :)

toomanythings2• 10 years ago

And Microsoft loves Linux, too.

Hydraulix989• 10 years ago

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

bloaf2• 10 years 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?

floatboth4• 10 years ago

1. No? NetBSD is a classic UNIX system. With rumpkernel though. 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

bloaf2• 10 years 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.

josteink• 10 years 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• 10 years 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 for previous discussions/celebration.

swalsh• 10 years 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.

mdip2• 10 years 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-t...

tracker12• 10 years 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.

WorldMaker2• 10 years ago

It wasn't just the note taking app. There was nearly a half-dozen mono-based applications included out of the box on Ubuntu in one brief "mono spring" in Ubuntu before the hate hit.

A particularly good example, I think, was the music app Banshee, which I thought was a much better application than what it replaced and what in turn replaced it in the Ubuntu default install.

Another example from that time was F-Spot, a photo library tool.

Apps built specifically for Mono, most of which were directly using Gnome's Gtk UI library (via the Gtk# bindings) were great apps. A lot of the hate really was just anti-Microsoft (and/or anti-Novell at the time) FUD. The fact that Mono had an on disk footprint about as much as Python was the useful tool in what was mostly (from my perspective) a useless debate.

mdip2• 10 years ago

Ha - gotta say, I feel a little better knowing someone else had a hard time getting mono targeted code to work properly.

I can't remember what I ran into specifically, but I remember the usual StackOverflow/Google route for solving the problem yielded either nothing, or in the case of google, a bunch of forum posts with replies like "Well, the problem is you're targeting Mono and that's a terrible thing to do for [insert reason here]" so I gave up.

I'm firmly planted in the .Net camp developing software for Windows specific products, but I've been a C/C++ developer in the past and have begun the long process of modernizing my C++ background. It's always good to have a few languages to call upon when a problem presents itself, but it's ideal to have a core one that can be used in many places and if all goes well, that'll be my case in a bit. I thoroughly enjoy writing code in C#.

.NET framework ported to NetBSD

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