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2022-10-04
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Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?
I am known to be a bit of a polemic when it comes to Rust. I will be forthright with the fact that I don’t particularly care for Rust, and that my public criticisms of it might set up many readers with a reluctance to endure yet another Rust Hot Take from my blog. My answer to the question posed in the title is, of course, “no”. However, let me assuage some of your fears by answering a different question first: does Hare belong in the Linux kernel?
If I should owe my allegiance to any programming language, it would be...
Notes from kernel hacking in Hare, part 2: multi-threading
I have long promised that Hare would not have multi-threading, and it seems that I have broken that promise. However, I have remained true to the not-invented-here approach which is typical of my style by introducing it only after designing an entire kernel to implement it on top of.1
For some background, Helios is a micro-kernel written in Hare. In addition to the project, the Vulcan system is a small userspace designed to test the kernel.
A picture of a laptop running Helios and showing the results of the Vulcan test suite
While I don’t anticipate multi-threaded processes playing a huge role in...
The phrase "open source" (still) matters
In 1988, “Resin Identification Codes” were introduced by the plastic industry. These look exactly like the recycling symbol ♺, which is not trademarked or regulated, except that a number is enclosed within the triangle. These symbols simply identify what kind of plastic was used. The vast majority of plastic is non-recyclable, but has one of these symbols on it to suggest otherwise. This is a deceptive business practice which exploits the consumer’s understanding of the recycling symbol to trick them into buying more plastic products.
The meaning of the term “open source” is broadly understood to be defined by the Open...
Status update, September 2022
I have COVID-19 and I am halfway through my stockpile of tissues, so I’m gonna keep this status update brief.
In Hare news, I finally put the last pieces into place to make cross compiling as easy as possible. Nothing else particularly world-shattering going on here. I have a bunch of new stuff in my patch queue to review once I’m feeling better, however, including bigint stuff — a big step towards TLS support. Unrelatedly, TLS support seems to be progressing upstream in qbe. (See what I did there?)
powerctl is a small new project I wrote to configure power management states on...
Notes from kernel hacking in Hare, part 1
One of the goals for the Hare programming language is to be able to write kernels, such as my Helios project. Kernels are complex beasts which exist in a somewhat unique problem space and have constraints that many userspace programs are not accustomed to. To illustrate this, I’m going to highlight a scenario where Hare’s low-level types and manual memory management approach shines to enable a difficult use-case.
Helios is a micro-kernel. During system initialization, its job is to load the initial task into memory, prepare the initial set of kernel objects for its use, provide it with information about the...