ferros VS serenity

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.

SerenityOS replicates that look and feel. It is also implemented in a dialect of C++ that adheres to some of the good parts of C++98: https://serenityos.org

One example of a useful technique

https://serenityos.org/ apparently only makes source code available. There are no binary images of the OS to install

I think Andreas said this functions like a little test -- if you're not willing to build it from source, then you probably wouldn't be a good contributor anyway.

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Likewise, my shell project provides source tarballs only, right now - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/

It is packaged in a number of places, which I appreciate. That means some other people are willing to do some work.

And they provide good feedback.

I would like it to be more widely available, but yeah I definitely see that you need to "gate" peanut gallery feedback a bit, because it takes up a lot of time.

Of course, it's a tricky balance, because you also want feedback from casual users, to make the project better.

Indeed, given the existence of `JS::NonnullGCPtr`, `JS::GcPtr` intentionally corresponds to a nullable pointer, so it seems dangerous to convert one to a reference without a null-check.

That said, a naive code search finds what *may* be more cases of this pattern:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ASerenityOS%2Fserenity+%2F...

Eg: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/a68b134e6dea5065... -> https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/a68b134e6dea5065...

In some of those search results, it is fine because there is a preceding null-check, and obviously I know nothing about this code other than this naive search result, but perhaps it would be prudent to vet all of them.

It is a SerenityOS project. You can find the answer to that question in their primary project's FAQ[1].

1. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documenta...

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

The best way to write proper exception free C++ is not to use the C++ Standard Library.

I initially confused it with Serenity OS prior to watching the video: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

My contributions to SerenityOS[0] helped me get my current job. My team lead (who was also my interviewer) was interested in what I did since I listed some of it in my CV, and I showed him some PRs I made and explained what went into each of them. It was really exciting because I didn't have professional experience with low-level development, and basically got the job due to hobby programming.

[0]: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pulls?q=is%3Apr+autho...

Definitely not "literally impossible", just a great deal of work. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird