MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • motor-os

    A simple, fast, and secure operating system for the cloud.

  • The author wrote this on reddit:

    > What does "Rust-first" mean here? It means not only that both the (micro) kernel and the drivers are implemented in Rust, but also that Rust is the first (and only, at the moment) language that userspace programs can be written in.

    > Although technically one can reverse-engineer the Rust-based ABI and the provided Rust toolchain to write apps for Motor OS in e.g. C, that is some work. But standard Rust programs (using standard Rust library, without FFI) will just compile and run - see e.g. https://github.com/moturus/motor-os/tree/main/src/bin/httpd.

    > This Rust-first approach is rather unique, as e.g. Redox uses relibc and C-based kernel ABI as the glue...

    https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/190znk5/mot%C5%ABrus_...

  • moto-runtime

  • I tried with async in the kernel first, but the cruft that was needed two years ago was not worth it in the kernel itself. The net I/O is actually async-first, see here: https://github.com/moturus/moto-runtime/blob/main/src/net.rs

    File I/O will move to this model later (the current file I/O code is quite old and mostly a placeholder).

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • wasmtime

    A fast and secure runtime for WebAssembly

  • When you say wasm container, you mean something like wasmtime that provides a non-browser wasm runtime?

    https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime

  • firecracker

    Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing.

  • I pass through a GPU and USB hub to a VM running on a machine in the garage. An optical video cable and network compatible USB extender brings the interface to a different room making it my primary “desktop” computer (and an outdated laptop as a backup device). Doesn’t get more silent and cool than this. Another VM on the garage machine gets a bunch of hard drives passed through to it.

    That said, hardware passthrough/VFIO is likely out of the current realistic scope for this project. VM boot times can be optimized if you never look for hardware to initialize in the first place. Though they are still likely initializing a network interface of some sort.

    “MicroVM” seems to be a term used when as much as possible is stripped from a VM, such as with https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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