ferros VS osv

My company, https://www.auxon.io. We created https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros originally to enable a customer project early in the company's life cycle.

Some time later we had another customer interested in using it and having us add some features to it (e.g. some device drivers and a persistence layer utilizing https://docs.rs/tickv/latest/tickv/). It was becoming a massive pain in the neck to work out source code sharing agreements with them, so we decided to just open source it.

There are quite a number of things that we would do differently if we had to build it again, and at some point will likely do that work to revise it. The biggest one of those is root task synthesis. The other is to build and bring in facilities for running tasks that are compiled to WASM.

When we add WASM support to https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros it'll sorta be like what you're angling at there in your description.

We've built things on seL4 (https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros). We like to joke that it's the most perfect piece of nearly featureless software ever made.

There's... A LOT... of work to do before seL4 is going to be anywhere near usability parity with something like Linux, unfortunately.

Rather than make a general purpose OS, we decided to use it more like a unikernel or "library OS" where you're trying to make a well defined kind of "appliance" image to deploy to specific hardware rather than try to fake being a POSIX-y shaped OS.

For what it's worth, here's FerrOS's repo as well as the underlying selfe repo

That's basically what we did with https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros, Bundle Rust programs together as tasks to run atop the formally verified seL4 microkernel.

We also built a Rust framework called FerrOS (https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros) atop the formally-verified seL4 microkernel.

It has a similar set of usage idioms to Hubris it looks like in terms of trying to setup as much as possible ahead of time to assemble what's kind of an application specific operating system where everything your use case needs is assembled at build-time as a bunch of communicating tasks running on seL4.

We recently added a concise little persistence interface that pulls in TicKV (https://docs.tockos.org/tickv/index.html) from the Tock project you referenced above, and some provisions are being added for some more dynamic task handling based on some asks from an automotive OEM.

We built a thing to enable combining Rust applications together to be hosted on the seL4 microkernel. The developer experience is more akin to that of something like an RTOS where the OS and your applications are built and deployed together. The whole premise of it is decidedly non-POSIX-like. The current point is for assembling software for use-case-specific/appliance computing, not general purpose computing. (https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros)

We're looking both for contributors and also actively hiring for a couple engineering positions for the above and for or mainline product.

I tried and failed to bring unikernels to my former work when I was at Visa. Specifically, LING.

At my current company, Auxon, we recently open sourced[1] some work we did a couple years back which is more or less an attempt at the basic foundations for blending the seL4 microkernel with fairly normal no_std Rust application development and assembling them all together to make a purpose built OS/application to deploy directly to hardware or within a VM. We have some work to do to keep building it up as a foundation for broader use, but we're looking into partnering with the seL4 Foundation (now under the Linux Foundation) to iterate on it further with some of our other mutual partners. The developer experience is much closer to that of developing for an RTOS than it is like typical general purpose computing development.

I'm of course biased, but I think there's a lot of room to innovate in the space of use case specific software stacks where the domain and constraints are well understood and too many degrees of freedom are actually a hindrance and a liability, not an advantage.

[1] https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros

On top of that is ferros (no relation to to ferrous-systems), a higher-level userland of unreasonably strong types for compile-time resource tracking. No more discovering you need more memory, or capability slots or IPC rights at runtime. These types help you fit the right seL4 screw to the right seL4 screwdriver.

I've been looking at a few.

https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv

https://ops.city/ (also nanovms) - this is one that I actually got working to at least demo state

I have also found OSv to be interesting.

https://osv.io/

Wow, just now seeing this topic. I work for a cloud company hosted in AWS. We started out, Netflix/Spotify style microservices. We were all on ec2 images generate by packer (and later with AWS Image Factory). When Docker hit, we kicked the tires but never did anything with it beyond using it for running unit tests, and later, infrastructure tests. 5 years ago, during a hackathon, our little group began experimenting with Unikernels, or library operating systems. Interestingly enough, these Unikernels were all stripped down BSD kernels. OSv is FreeBSD based, and Rumprun is NetBSD based. Services running in EC2 on Unikernels would spin up and start sending and receiving traffic before the AWS EC2 healthchecks completed. They are blazing fast! Only problem in 2017, was the tooling. It would have taken too much effort to use Unikernals with our infrastructure. As soon as they start making Unikernels that can run Java bytecode like native code, the fate of containerization will be sealed, IMO. We could get basic JVM webservers running on OSv, but not Cassandra, not Kafka, not yet. OSv now runs on Firecracker, but I have not tried it out, yet. Some links if you are interested: OSv: https://osv.io Rumprun: https://github.com/rumpkernel/rumprun We used this tooling during the Hackathon, but doesn't look like it has been touched in 3 years: https://github.com/solo-io/unik Unikraft Unikernel Dev kit: https://unikraft.org/ And don't forget Firecracker running in Kubernetes https://www.weave.works/oss/firekube/ And of course, being a FreeBSD subreddit, let's not forget FreeBSD on Firecracker https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2022-10-18-FreeBSD-Firecracker.html

Whats the difference to OSv?

https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv

OSv Unikernel — Optimizing Guest OS to Run Stateless and Serverless Apps in the Cloud — Waldek Kozaczuk [OSv Committer] Unikernels have been demonstrated to deliver excellent performance in terms of throughput and latency, while providing high isolation. However they have also been shown to underperform in some types of workloads when compared to a generic OS like Linux. In this presentation, we demonstrate that certain types of workloads - web servers, microservices, and other stateless and/or serverless apps - can greatly benefit from OSv optimized networking stack and other features. We describe number of experiments where OSv outperforms Linux guest: most notably we note 1.6 throughput (req/s) and 0.6 latency improvement (at p99 percentile) when running nginx and 1.7 throughput (req/s) and 0.6 latency improvement (at p99 percentile) when running simple microservice implemented in Golang. We also show that OSv' small kernel, low boot time and memory consumption allow for very high density when running server-less workloads. The experiment described in this presentation shows we can boot 1,800 OSv microVMs per second on AWS c5n.metal machine with 72 CPUs (25 boots/sec on single CPU) with guest boot time recorded as low as 8.98ms at p50 and 31.49ms at p99 percentile respectively. Lastly we also demonstrate how to automate the build process of the OSv kernel tailored exactly to the specific app and/or VMM so that only the code and symbols needed are part of the kernel and nothing more. OSv is an open source project and can be found at https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv.

I guess you could have a JVM like that, but not OpenJDK. There is, however, a unikernel that supports running itself and OpenJDK in the same process: http://osv.io/

> Oracle used to offer an installation mode like this

Oracle, and BEA before them, used to offer a JVM which ran on top of a thin custom OS designed only to host the JVM, you could call it a "unikernel". Product was called JRockit Virtual Edition (JRVE), WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE, when used to run WebLogic), earlier BEA called it LiquidVM. The internal name for that thin custom OS was in fact "Bare Metal". Similar in concept to https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv but completely different implementation

I think one thing which caused a problem for it, is a lot of customers want to deploy various management tools to their VMs (security auditing software, performance monitoring software, etc) and when your VM runs a custom OS that becomes very difficult or impossible. So adopting this product could lead to the pain of having to ask for exceptions to policies requiring those tools and then defending the decision to adopt it against those who use those policies to argue against it. I think this is part of why the product was discontinued.

Nowadays, Oracle offers "bare metal servers" [1] – which are just hypervisor-less servers, same as other cloud vendors do. Or similarly, "Oracle Database Appliance Bare Metal System" [2] – which just means not installing a hypervisor on your Oracle Database Appliance.

So Oracle seems to have a history of using the phrase "bare metal" in both the senses being discussed here.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/bare-metal.html

[2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/engineered-systems/oracle-databas...