ferros VS tracing

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.

The video description is as follows:

In this stream, we peel back the crust on the tracing crate — https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/ — and explore its interface, structure, and mechanisms. We talk about spans, events, their attributes and fields, and how to think about them in async code. We also dig into what subscribers are, how they pick up events, and how you can construct your own subscribers through the layer abstraction. For more details about tracing, see https://docs.rs/tracing/latest/tracing/.

> What's been your biggest issues around ergonomics/amenities for OpenTelemetry?

I can't speak generally, but in the Rust ecosystem the various crates don't play well together. Here's one example: <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/issues/2648> There are four crates involved (tracing-attributes, tracing-opentelemetry, opentelemetry, and opentelemetry-datadog) and none of them fit properly into any of the others.

The tracing (logging) mechanism in an asynchronous codebase (tracing).

Tracing is Tokio's alternative for async code.

At a technical level, in Rust, both [tracing]https://crates.io/crates/tracing) and log are entire ecosystems (though for the latter at least there's also third party logging frameworks), and there's at least a bridge from log to tracing.

I am using https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing for logging purposes in my application. I would like to develop a feature wherein logs should be saved to a database table (via sea-orm). Something similar is this, but it does not solve my needs fully.

I've used the tracing infrastructure with tracing_flame to profile some hot paths in async code: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/tree/master/tracing-flame

Oh nice! IIRC when I checked, it was the Unicode tables that smashed the code size. I recently hit the same issue with the tracing crate, where a crate feature (for env var filtering) pulled in regex and my binary was suddenly 1MB bigger.

I know about tools such as tracing, jaeger or tracy. While having a complete tracing could be a potential solution, these tools don't work with no_std.

tracing by itself only outputs log data, you need to consume them in a subscriber, the tracing-subscriber crate exists for this. (example)