Includeable minimal operating system for C++

https://www.includeos.org/

by we-do-not-sow • 2 years ago

183 46 2 years ago

Very cool.

quotemstr• 2 years ago

Amazing how we've come full circle. Type II hypervisors treat VM guests as processes, so is it any wonder we've developed ways to develop them as processes? A paravirtualized VM is just a process with a different (and arguably better) system call interface.

nickpsecurity• 2 years ago

The distinction started with rings of protection which was orthogonal to processes. Roger Schell said the guy who designed the one for Intel’s 286 had security kernels like GEMSOS in mind. Here’s GEMSOS and STOP so you can see how they did that back in the 1980’s:

https://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse443-s12/docs/ch6.pdf

caseyy2• 2 years ago

Pretty cool way to turn x86es into embedded machines.

zeusk• 2 years ago

Checkout https://osdev.org

And actually, x86 started life as an embedded processor :)

caseyy2• 2 years ago

Ah, much simpler than I anticipated. Thank you for sharing

MisterTea• 2 years ago

For a similar embedded RTOS there is RTEMS https://www.rtems.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEMS

An interesting example would be GRiSP where Erlang's BEAM was ported to an Arm Cortex M7 microcontroller with 64 MB of external RAM. https://www.grisp.org/

gpderetta4• 2 years ago

This seems very interesting!

But... "So IncludeOS can compile C and C++ applications natively. Currently, these are the only programming languages supported. We’ll add support for other language runtimes in 2019."

Last blog update is 2019. Is the project still alive?

edit: github shows recent activity, so it is encouraging.

PittleyDunkin5• 2 years ago

Ok but the C abi includes basically all languages. Frankly they could toss C++ in the trash with basically zero impact to their value because who the hell with two neurons to rub together uses C++ anymore?

(Ok this leaves out Go but they picked their path)

Besides, supporting c++ must be a goddamn nightmare.

gpderetta4• 2 years ago

who the hell with two neurons to rub together uses C++ anymore?

I don't know. Then again I had my mandatory lobotomy when I started to professionally program in C++ 20 years ago (and still do to this day).

pjmlp• 2 years ago

Lets put it this way, C++ is C's Typescript.

Everything about JavaScript WATs applies equally well to C.

award_• 2 years ago

I've seen this come up here and elsewhere before, always very cool! I always wonder who's actually using it for production workloads, in what context, etc.

It feels like so much of the world focuses on docker images that alternatives are pretty hard to get going.

j16sdiz• 2 years ago

I found the linked page very confusing, the whole page just say some generic unikernel stuffs

This page is much better, telling me how it is different/interesting https://www.includeos.org/technology.html

cmrdporcupine• 2 years ago

Isn't this what's more typically called a unikernel?

EDIT: I see, their GH page actually uses this term, but this landing page does not.

a2128• 2 years ago

What's with the recommendation for a YouTube MP3 converter near the bottom? There seems to be no technological relation so I can only guess the author got paid to include it, but you're legally supposed to disclose if something is a paid ad

jagged-chisel• 2 years ago

Is it a legal requirement? I thought it (disclaiming ads) was something one did to avoid the proverbial pitchforks and nothing more.

samatman• 2 years ago

There is no such legal requirement whatsoever.

It's part of the terms of service of a number of social networks, I can almost see how someone might confuse that for the law. If I squint.

wmf• 2 years ago

16 CFR Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...

wrs• 2 years ago

The FTC has guidance on when it considers a compensated endorsement to be "deceptive advertising", which is something they can legally enforce. [0]

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

gr4vityWall• 2 years ago

Is that a legal requirement where the owner of that website is?

I agree with you, that ad is placed in a odd place. It looks so out of place, I would believe it was copy-pasted there by mistake, if it weren't for the HTML link.

johndough2• 2 years ago

The members seem to mostly be from Norway and Norway has a law against "hidden" advertising, which I believe applies here.

mserdarsanli• 2 years ago

according to wayback machine the domain expired at the end of 2021. Months later it came back with the sneaky ad. Their page at github https://includeos.github.io/ does not have it. It is safe to assume whoever grabbed the domain has no association to the authors.

Project has been dead for many years now btw.

fwsgonzo3• 2 years ago

You're completely right. It's a squatter and he wants money. The project is not dead, however. It's currently used for research at University of Oslo, and I think we can expect much more activity in the coming years, such as ARM support.

I might add RISC-V support myself, as I am the author of libriscv. We'll see.

PittleyDunkin5• 2 years ago

Project has been dead for many years now btw.

Code doesn't die. Especially code targetting the c abi.

dangerwill• 2 years ago

Oh this is wildly cool! Do cloud providers like aws allow you to upload a custom system image to run as a vm?

shanemhansen• 2 years ago

My information is probably out of date but historically yes. Also historically operating systems other than Linux were pretty iffy.

I know you can run BSD on AWS for example.

eyberg• 2 years ago

Absolutely. Everyone who deploys unikernels to the public clouds does this. Some are better fits than others. AWS for instance you can build an image and deploy an ec2 instance in a matter of seconds.

pshc• 2 years ago

Sounds neat but very minimal:

Node.js-style callback-based programming - everything happens in one efficient thread with no I/O blocking or unnecessary guest-side context switching.
No race conditions. Delegated IRQ handling makes race conditions in “userspace” “impossible”. …unless you implement threads yourself (you have the access) or we do.

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

A game server could perhaps be another valid use case for this technology. A simple program, performance maximized, cost minimized.

VikingCoder• 2 years ago

Reminds me of Cosmopolitan C Compiler / Actually Portable Executables.

snowAbstraction• 2 years ago

This 2016 podcast discusses this in depth: https://cppcast.com/alfred-bratterud/

dejw• 2 years ago

so is anyone actually using it?

mgaunard• 2 years ago

It's cool, but this only runs with VirtIO hardware.

If you need real-time low-latency, you don't want any virtual hardware.

I'm not sure what's the practical application here. Either you use containers because you have complex dependencies so you want to just package the whole thing in isolation, or you don't and you might as well run as a normal process. Here you have a simple self-contained executable image anyway.

But to be honest I never understood the point of virtualization.

erichocean• 2 years ago

There's almost no reason to do anything weird with operating systems today, because you can run Linux on a single core of your multi-core machine, and your app at full throttle (no context switching) on the remaining cores.

So for the cost of <1 core and a small amount of RAM>, you get full Linux, full debuggability, SSH, file systems, networking, etc. and your app still runs as fast as it can on the CPU.

Spend your innovation budget on your app, not the OS.

gpderetta4• 2 years ago

You get another layer of address space separation.

Then again, you can run a linux vm on one core and your unikernel app on the other cores on top of an hypervisor.

gpderetta4• 2 years ago

For a similar take on C++ unikernel, there is also OSv [1,2], from the same authors of seastar [3] and ScyllaDB.

[1] https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv

[2] https://osv.io/

[3] https://seastar.io/

Includeable minimal operating system for C++

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