minibase VS cosmopolitan

I remember simple use cases for clone() such as spawning child processes with just enough shared resources to execve(). I remember reading a lot of old emails from Torvalds about it, can't find them anymore.

I used to value portability but now I believe in using Linux everywhere and for everything. I like OpenBSD too but Linux is the stable one you can build anything on. What I wanted to eventually accomplish is a 100% freestanding Linux user space with no libraries at all. Maybe boot straight into the program I want to use, just like we can pass init=/usr/bin/bash in the kernel command line. How far could this go? Using nothing but system calls it's actually possible to get a framebuffer and use software renderering to draw some graphics. I'm guessing pretty far.

By starting from scratch like this it's possible to fix all the historical problems with our systems. For example, I think it's unacceptable when libraries keep global state. This can't be fixed without getting rid of libc and its buffers and caches and errno. Removing this cruft would actually simplify a threads implementation. And then there's completely insane stuff that should be dropped like .init and .fini sections:

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/init-and-fini-processing-wh...

A similar statically-linked user space project I found years ago:

https://github.com/arsv/minibase

> Using a binary for each platform and chip is the past.

Cosmopolitan sends its regards: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

> Rise above with lightweight container[...]

Ah yes, that famously lightweight way of distributing software, full on virtualised containers, each running an OS.

Case in point:

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s...

The system call numbers of all the unixlikes are bitwise packed into a single number. There is exactly one of those columns which is stable: the Linux one. Everything else is not part of the binary interface of their respective operating systems.

I've written about how Linux is special in this regard:

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls

It's a neat hack but I'm afraid it's in grave danger of falling victim to the Darth Vader of OS ABI stability.

https://lwn.net/Articles/806870/

> Program to the API rather than the ABI.

> When we see benefits, we change the ABI more often than the API.

> I have altered the ABI.

> Pray I do not alter it further.

Maybe portable CL binaries soon-ish (in CL units of time, mind you)!

Conditional on https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/939 as mentioned in INSTALL

Cosmo gives you what you described above and it’s <10kb

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

llamafiles will run on all architectures because they are compiled by cosmopolitan.

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

  Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable.

My comment was based on cloning master yesterday and trying to build redbean but hitting what looks like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/940

Indeed it lioks like the commit you mentioned should have fixed the issue with the pointer having too many bits for the weird kernel used on android and some raspis. Fingers crossed that release works.