tock VS redox

Hi! This is Daniel from OxidOS Automotive (stating this for disclaimer purposes).

Yes, our OS is based on TockOS, and our CEO (Alex Radovici) is #7 in the contributors list (https://github.com/tock/tock/graphs/contributors), with other colleagues contributing in the past years.

I'm definitely not the best person to answer this, but honestly it's not bad. Here's an example of a moderately complex peripheral, the cortex-m MPU, and how one rust OS handles it:

https://github.com/tock/tock/blob/3a0527d586702b8ae8cb242391...

Reads and writes turn into volatile reads, so everything works out under the hood. You get the benefits of everything having good names, declared sizes, and proper typing on your register accesses. You can extend that to bit accesses as well.

Rust still has a few areas it isn't competitive in, like your hyper limited or obscure chips (e.g. 8051s, XAP), mature tooling around formal methods, and a certification story for safety critical code. People are working on these latter two issues (e.g. ferrocene) and supposedly very close to public delivery, but you know how slow the industry is to adopt new things even then.

There's Tock (https://www.tockos.org/), which is written in Rust (with sprinkles of assembly).

Yeah, and I like I mentioned in the earlier comment, omitting the frame pointer reduces code size by 10% on RISC-V targets, which is huge when dealing with embedded flash: https://github.com/tock/tock/pull/1660

Tock is an excellent embedded OS written in Rust and has some good industrial support. I think Tock gets a lot of stuff right and I highly recommend some of the talks the developers gave on it.

Unfortunately, it increases the code size by 10%. I was looking into this just last week, and can confirm that it's still a problem on the latest version of Rust nightly: https://github.com/tock/tock/pull/1660

I wish we could have frame pointers, because they would make working in embedded land so much easier and more reliable, but a 10% increase in code size just isn't worth it.

Redox is another full fledged OS written in rust by Pop OS developer

https://github.com/redox-os/redox

Even in the noncommercial world, Hurd's gone precisely nowhere. RedoxOS is a toy and had a GUI within a year or so. Brutal got in within two. SerenityOS not only built a GUI but the beginnings of the first greenfield web browser to gain any semblance of modern standards support in the past several decades. Honestly, what's Hurd doing wrong to flounder so hard?

[0] https://github.com/redox-os/redox/releases/tag/0.0.3

[1] https://github.com/brutal-org/brutal/releases

[2] https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/

Ah yes, std, that famous crate that is unusable for systems programming. God forbid anyone do any "systems" programming that uses std.

Operating System: Theseus, Redox

Looks like C++ to me!

And my point is that when you mention OS-es like Mezzano (3k stars on Github, a dozen contributors [1]) and Redox (13k stars, 80 contributors [2]), but don't mention Serenity (18k stars, over 100 contributors [3] (Github limits this view to the top 100)) it seems funny.

[0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Kernel/Ar...

[1] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano/graphs/contributors

[2] https://github.com/redox-os/redox/graphs/contributors

[3] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/contributors

Side note, blog posts may have been quiet but there's still been some commit activity here and there.

>I wish opportunities had been around when I was learning to program.

And yet now, we have plenty of projects and nobody contributing.

https://github.com/redox-os/redox/graphs/contributors

This graph doesn't look so healthy. Projects with one major contributor tend to die the moment that contributor loses interest.

Which leads me to wonder, if rust is so popular, and this is one of the most relevant rust projects in the wild, why is this essentially a single contributor repo? Linus didn't write Linux by himself. Redox is never going to happen with a single developer.

Doesn't anyone want a memory safe OS and micro kernel? What does this say about the demand for memory safe systems languages?

I think the guy behind RedoxOS works for them.

redox os is rust operating system without c , here

RedoxOS, an OS written in Rust A tutorial on making an OS in Rust, complwte with bootable source