humility
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humility | allsorts | |
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6 | 10 | |
512 | 696 | |
2.5% | 3.0% | |
8.2 | 8.4 | |
7 days ago | 4 months ago | |
Rust | Rust | |
Mozilla Public License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
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humility
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Barracuda Urges Replacing – Not Patching – Its Email Security Gateways
A lot of questions in there! Taking these in order:
1. We aren't making standalone servers: the Oxide compute sled comes in the Oxide rack. So are not (and do not intend to be) a drop in replacement for extant rack mounted servers.
2. We have taken a fundamentally different approach to firmware, with a true root of trust that can attest to the service processor -- which can turn attest to the system software. This prompts a lot of questions (e.g., who attests to the root of trust?), and there is a LOT to say about this; look for us to talk a lot more about this
3. In stark contrast (sadly) to nearly everyone else in the server space, the firmware we are developing is entirely open source. More details on that can be found in Cliff Biffle's 2021 OSFC talk and the Hubris and Humility repos.[0][1][2]
4. Definitely not vaporware! We are in the process of shipping to our first customers; you can follow our progress in our Oxide and Friends podcast.[3]
[0] https://www.osfc.io/2021/talks/on-hubris-and-humility-develo...
[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris
[2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/humility
[3] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
- Do you use Rust in your professional career?
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What's the project you're currently working on at your company as a Rust developer?
It's a mix of embedded work and improving the system's tooling (faster builds, debugger support, etc)
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Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
Other folks have mentioned this, but it's important to understand the limitations of Rust with respect to safety. In particular: every stack operation is -- at some level -- an unsafe operation as it operates without a bounds check. This isn't Rust's fault per se; non-segmented architectures don't have an architecturally defined way to know the stack base. As a result, even an entirely safe Rust program can make an illegal access to memory that results in fatal program failure. That, of course, assumes memory protection; if you don't have memory protection (or, like many embedded operating systems, you don't make use of it), stack overflows will plow into adjacent memory.
But wait, it gets worse: stack overflows are often not due to infinite stack consumption (e.g., recursion) but rather simply going deep on an unusual code path. If stack consumption just goes slightly beyond the base of the stack and there is no memory protection, this is corrupt-and-run -- and you are left debugging a problem that looks every bit like a gnarly data race in an unsafe programming language. And this problem becomes especially acute when memory is scarce: you really don't want a tiny embedded system to be dedicating a bunch of its memory to stack space that will never ("never") be used, so you make the stacks as tight as possible -- making stack overflows in fact much more likely.
Indeed, even with the MPU, these problems were acute in the development of Hubris: we originally put the stack at the top of a task's data space, and its data at the bottom -- and we found that tasks that only slightly exceeded their stack (rather than running all of the way through its data and into the protection boundary) were corrupting themselves with difficult-to-debug failures. We flipped the order to assure that every stack overflow hit the protection boundary[0], which required us to be much more intentional about the stack versus data split -- but had the added benefit of allowing us to add debugging support for it.[1]
Stack overflows are still pesky (and still a leading cause of task death!), but without the MPU, each one of these stack overflows would be data corruption -- answering for us viscerally what we "need the MPU for."
[0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris/commit/d75e832931f67...
[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/humility#humility-stackmarg...
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Writing embedded firmware using Rust
In addition to Cliff's talk/blog -- which are absolutely outstanding -- I would recommend listening to the Twitter Space we did on Hubris and Humility last week.[0] It was a really fun conversation, and it also serves as a bit of a B-side for the talk in that it goes into some of the subtler details that we feel are important, but didn't quite rise to the level of the presentation. And of course, be sure to check out the source itself![1][2]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cypmufnPfLw
[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris
[2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/humility
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Hubris - OS for embedded computer systems
Humility (the debugger)
allsorts
- Cosmic Text: Pure Rust multi-line text handling
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Is it conveninent to make cross-platform GUI softwares using Rust now?
But again you don't need to reinvent text layout from scratch (that's my discussion, BTW) if you use the platform's native text drawing facilities, like DirectWrite on Windows, or CoreText on macOS.
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Getting a pointer to a field of an enum
All these layers of Cows create an extremely complex lifetime tree and it's actually not possible to factor out the complex parsing steps into functions because they depend on a lot of stuff. (trying to return an OutlineBuilder from a function would dangling reference about 3 different temporaries, for example. Obtaining the temporaries is part of the parsing step)
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Rust's Option and Result. In Python.
machine learning, neural networks, image processing, cryptography (though it is getting better), font shaping/rendering (though it is getting better), CPU/software rendering (though it is getting better)
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What's the project you're currently working on at your company as a Rust developer?
It can be used for the things you suggest but our driving use case is font parsing. The goal is to use it to generate the font parsing code in Allsorts, which is ultimately used in Prince.
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Question: Expected webrender impact, or influence, on emacs redisplay
Use allsorts or rustbuzz for text shaping
- Text Rendering w/ HarfBuzz, FreeType and OpenGL
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Text Rendering
Loader -> Allsorts
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Speedy2D: Easy-to-use library for graphics, text, and input events
It's something I'd like to improve on in future -- are there any pure-Rust libraries you'd recommend for shaping? Allsorts looks quite promising.
- Ask HN: How do you use Rust at work?
What are some alternatives?
tock - A secure embedded operating system for microcontrollers
rustybuzz - A complete harfbuzz's shaping algorithm port to Rust
esp32-hal - A hardware abstraction layer for the esp32 written in Rust.
rust-harfbuzz - Rust bindings to HarfBuzz
hubris - A lightweight, memory-protected, message-passing kernel for deeply embedded systems.
pathfinder - A fast, practical GPU rasterizer for fonts and vector graphics
fathom - 🚧 (Alpha stage software) A declarative data definition language for formally specifying binary data formats. 🚧
glium - Safe OpenGL wrapper for the Rust language.
xsv - A fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust.
lingua-rs - The most accurate natural language detection library for Rust, suitable for short text and mixed-language text
InfiniTime - Firmware for Pinetime smartwatch written in C++ and based on FreeRTOS
fontdue - The fastest font renderer in the world, written in pure rust.