Minoca OS goes open source [LWN.net]

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:11 UTC (Tue) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (1 responses)

Important caveat:

"Proprietary and non-GPL source licenses are available, keeping options open for your customers and end users."

Contributors need to sign CLAs that permit upstream to relicense contributions under proprietary licenses.

-Brad

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:35 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link]

Would love to see you and/or the Grsec team go through this and see if it is any good. Your work on grsec is legend and makes everyone safer in the end even if upstream doesn't always accept things as is.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:18 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (18 responses)

Somebody clearly was influenced by Windows...

Their kernel uses all the same design patterns as WinNT from what I can see from the source code. They also have layered driver structure with generalized IRP packets traversing the chain. They have even copied the idea of IRQLs ( https://www.minocacorp.com/doc/1375/api/KERNEL_API/elemen... ). LOL.

I personally don't see the reason for it to exist - it's not like there are no minimalist kernels out there. And it's also pure C, so it's guaranteed to be full of buffer overflows and other classic C-based vulnerabilities.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:28 UTC (Tue) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (1 responses)

Lots of the same function names and struct names too. Just from a brief look:

KPROCESS
KeGetCurrentThread()
IMAGE_SECTION
MmHandleFault()
TRAP_FRAME

memory descriptor lists, *AllocatePool with a tag argument, etc

-Brad

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:29 UTC (Tue) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link]

Correction: the Windows function is actually named MmAccessFault()

-Brad

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:29 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (3 responses)

now if there is an OS written in Javascript that would have a good reason to exist...

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 1, 2016 19:53 UTC (Tue) by fratti (guest, #105722) [Link] (1 responses)

as a warning to others not to make the same mistakes?

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 6:25 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

As a goad to an INTERCAL implementation.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 3, 2016 11:05 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Well, there is a javascript x86(?) emulator out there that's good enough to run Linux. Does that count?

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 4:21 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

In the HN thread it was claimed they worked on the NT kernel:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841691
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12838904

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 5:27 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (10 responses)

And it's also pure C, so it's guaranteed to be full of buffer overflows and other classic C-based vulnerabilities.

What language would you write an OS kernel in, if starting from scratch now? It seems to me the choices are C or something equally low-level, and therefore sharing the same safety problems.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 8:02 UTC (Wed) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link] (3 responses)

Rust would be a possible option.

There is redox-os which is a micro kernel approach written mostly in rust.
But on OS level safe rust is not enough, at the moment at least, so they have to use rusts 'unsafe' keyword on a few places, planning to reduce the usage to an absolute minimum.
IIRC, ~ 16% of the kernel code is (possible) 'unsafe' and thus may have the same problems as C regarding memory, the rest should be safe by design (regarding memory, other bugs may naturally happen).

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 8:16 UTC (Wed) by t-v (subscriber, #112111) [Link]

You could combine two recent LWN news items and use corrode (LWN bit) to translate Minoca OS to Rust.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 5, 2016 6:33 UTC (Sat) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Or Ada or Modula-3, both of which were designed for high-reliability systems programming. (Note that Modula-3 isn't very closely related to Modula-2.)

I worked with an OS written in Ada back in the 1980s, and it had very few places that needed escapes to unsafe constructs.

It's possible that Rust may be a better choice than either of those, though I haven't actually studied Rust so I'm not certain.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 7, 2016 7:09 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> There is redox-os which is a micro kernel approach written mostly in rust.
> But on OS level safe rust is not enough, at the moment at least, so they have to use rusts 'unsafe' keyword on a few places, planning to reduce the usage to an absolute minimum.
> IIRC, ~ 16% of the kernel code is (possible) 'unsafe' and thus may have the same problems as C regarding memory, the rest should be safe by design (regarding memory, other bugs may naturally happen).

I would expect 16% of a micro-kernel to be a reasonably small code base. It is probably still a lot of code, but perhaps at least somewhat easier to secure.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 8:52 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

Something that is _not_ C (or C++ for that matter). Rust looks very promising. And there are several projects that develop ways to prove safety of unsafe{} blocks in Rust. There are other very interesting new approaches to OS development, like http://osv.io/

That would have been at least interesting. But another C-based non-realtime OS with a classic monolithic kernel? Meh.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 9:57 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

There are other very interesting new approaches to OS development, like http://osv.io/

New? That appears to be a reinvention of the idea of running a simple single-tasking OS on top of a hypervisor. Pioneered in IBM CP/CMS from the sixties...

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 15:25 UTC (Wed) by miquels (guest, #59247) [Link]

Yeah, unikernels .. why do people keep re-inventing them, we've had one for a long time, FreeDOS.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 18:22 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Everything was invented in Multics and since then people have been reinventing it. Duh.

However, it's the first modern OS built on that idea with attention to performance inside containers.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 13:45 UTC (Wed) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link] (1 responses)

And there are several projects that develop ways to prove safety of unsafe{} blocks in Rust.

Ah, do you happen to have any links? I was wondering why I haven't come across any such projects yet.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 18:33 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

One of the projects is: http://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/ ( https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2015/10/12/formalizing-rust.html ). The other project I know of is not public yet.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 11:20 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

They claim they can boot to a shell in 5 MB of RAM. This is unimpressive.
Linux can boot to a shell in 4MB of RAM while using a ramdisk.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 15:44 UTC (Wed) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link] (1 responses)

This is essentially a bait-and-switch licensing model. I'd like to think the market is educated about such things at this point, but I could be wrong.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 9, 2016 8:33 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Yeah. I love this blog about it: http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2010/03/31/open-c...

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 2, 2016 16:43 UTC (Wed) by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966) [Link] (2 responses)

I fail to see the niche this OS is targeting.

It seems to have similar resource requirements to Linux whilst having support for far fewer devices (https://www.minocacorp.com/documentation/developers/knowl...) and filesystems (FAT only for the moment, EXT2 coming next)

"Minoca OS runs on x86, ARMv6, or ARMv7 systems that contain virtual memory support and at least a few megabytes of RAM. The OS is highly scalable, so it can also run on larger machines with multiple cores and many gigabytes of RAM."

There's certainly a place for a much smaller OS for places Linux will never fit (and already plenty of contenders for that space) but it doesn't seem built for that.

Licensing wise it's GPL3 so unlikely to appeal to those that don't want to or can't use the GPL.

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 3, 2016 0:20 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (1 responses)

That fits into their business model.. if you cannot use the GPL you can get other arrangements

Minoca OS goes open source

Posted Nov 3, 2016 11:14 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

… which also ensures that nobody will volunteer their time for working on Minoca.

No IPv6 support (yet) also means at best marginal utility for IoT, despite their (unspecific) claims about power saving.