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Asterinas: a rust kernel with a linux ABI (asterinas.github.io)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Linux maintainers are unwilling to get rust into the kernel, so some rust folks decided to start writing a new kernel with same ABI. This allows them to make new architectural decisions. An example being their "frame kernel" (something between a monolithic kernel and a microkernel).

If I may say, it's more legible and the tooling is way better, right off the bat.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

ok, just a few points from me, typed very quickly because im in a hurry so forgive me if its not very coherent:

the gpl is very popular, its the apgl that has less popularity. The gpl is used by thousands of software projects, and the linux kernel is one of the few projects that did not upgrade to v3, many did, but still, they use the gpl! Thats not an argument against it! Using gplv2 is still fine!
if the linux kernel was more permissive we would absolutely not have better drivers. The linux kernel supports a crazy amount of hardware, a lot more than any other OS! How can you say that support is poor? Bad Drivers are mostly nvidia, broadcom, and chinese vendors that ignore the gpl, and yes, these drivers are bad because they dont want to open source anything(or, my guess, its because of low market share). But imagine that the kernel was MIT. Suddenly, wow, nvidia and broadcom might release more drivers, amazing my laptop wifi card works now! Exept 5 years later the driver breaks in creative ways and broadcom isnt interested in fixing it because its out of support. Proprietary drivers arent the solution to bad drivers, they are bad drivers by their design. its the reson why nvidia drivers are hated, because they are mostly closed binaries so nobody can fix them, and they develop them their way so wayland etc is still buggy. If it was MIT nothing would change in this situation, exept they have more legal possibilities of making badly integrated drivers.
you gave andoid as an example, but that uses the linux kernel? The "good" driver support is kernel modules for the andoid kernel, aka gpl compatible? And support for ARM is good, yes, that is by the way also true for regular linux. And when it is not, its because they didnt mainline their drivers, which is a lot of work and doesnt benefit them apart from goodwill, not because of licensing. What is your argument here?
Do you think that android would have been open source if the gpl didnt force them to?
a permissive license doesnt mean it immediately gets abused. But it does mean that abuse is possible, and it does happen. I dont want to live in a world where the best linux is microsoft© linux™ which has ads and their own packages, which are for some reason, incompatible with free linuxes because of extra features in microlinux©®™

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I'm absolutely with you on point 5. As for the rest, I will have to admit that I may have said some things plain wrong. I'm just trying to drive the point that it's not inmoral and people should be happy anyway. Perhaps in 10 years this is the OS we are all using on our desktops, phones, and wearables. It would be a pity that's not GPL and it has ads, sure (like maybe Android on x-brand flagship mew phone). But we could then have the LineageOS version of this. And I'd be happy. My poiny being, if that happens (it turns out to be the biggest OS), it will be thanks to its license, allowing it to be a thing for both people, and companies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Oh.. I just saw your point. I'm comparing to Android (LineageOS) when it should be to iOS... void

Well, then this news are just sad.