Information on implementing L4

[John]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 10:34 PM Andrew Warkentin <andreww591 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 9/13/18, John <john.r.moser at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm surveying the field at the moment and looking at all the advances
> made
> > in computer software—security, managed language runtimes, hypervisors,
> > real-time OS—and trying to project the possibilities for a
> next-generation
> > operating system.  There's enough divergence that a rewrite from scratch
> > might make sense; and besides, I've drawn up a method for getting a
> > self-hosting CLR running with only anonymous memory allocation and VFS
> file
> > page mapping, along with a method of getting the CLR to self-host and
> > getting it up and running before an actual OS kernel.
> >
>
> It seems like things might be moving away from managed code somewhat.
> Safer native code languages like Rust have been starting to become
> more popular in recent years. I think safer native code is a better
> approach than Java/.NET-style manged code, since there's no
> performance penalty and the runtime is just a library rather than a
> more complex VM (which is often written in an unsafe native code
> language, leaving more attack surface than a system in which
> everything security-critical is written in a safer language). I'm
>

Eh, I happen to like C# as a language.

Also, there's not necessarily a performance penalty in CLR because it's JIT
to native code.  The CLR isn't actually interpreting bytecode as it goes;
rather it's compiling the program, storing that compiled program in memory,
and entering the compiled native code.  The outcome is the same as
compiling a language to a native machine language.

I designed a way for the CLR to self-host:  it'd be written in C#, and
running on itself.  This is still theoretical, of course.

At its heart, the CLR is just converting bytecode to machine code.  The
thing people call a "VM" is basically a compiler and a garbage collector.


> taking the safer native code approach in the OS that I'm writing (a
> Rust-based next-generation Unix-like OS that will somewhat resemble
> QNX and Plan 9; <https://gitlab.com/uxrt>).
>
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