Revirt – Virtualization on Redox OS | Hacker News Reader

Revirt – Virtualization on Redox OS

redox-os.org

54 pointscassepipe16 comments

I keep getting RedoxOS (Unix-like in Rust) and ReactOS (WindowsNT clone) confused whenever I see them.

At least it's not called ReduxOS I guess

I must say not researching how bhyve and openbsd vmm work seems like fairly major omission, especially as both are significantly newer projects than kvm and presumably would have learned from it.

anyone know what applications you can run on it ?

does it support ELF so we can in theory use it or is this just a research project?

https://doc.redox-os.org/book/ch04-19-programs-libraries.htm...

> Redox does not support dynamic-link libraries yet (issue #927), so the libraries that a program uses are statically linked into its compiled binary.

Sounds like a feature that shouldn't be "fixed".

There exist some cases that don't play nice with full/mandatory static linking, like programs that load extensions by loading them as libraries at runtime.

I don't think system-level static linking precludes loading code for e.g. extensions at runtime. Although admittedly I can't say I know any examples of doing that offhand, and in many ways you'd be building an limited ad-hoc dynamic linking system.

https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/-/issues/927#note... implies that redox doesn't currently have dlopen(); while I agree that you hardly need dynamic linking for everything in order to support plugins, my meaning was that you need to allow at least some dynamic linking for it to work.

I guess you could include your own dynamic linker in your binary. Mmap the shared object, perform the relocations, etc. It seems like you could write a static library to do this so that the Redox itself doesn't need any specific support?

With PIC you wouldn't even need to do relocs?

Makes it easier, but you can't entirely avoid relocations. https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/03/position-independen... seems like a decent explanation.

We took this approach with the first version of a from-scratch hypervisor at my last job. Portions of the hypervisor were separated into different shared libraries and we wrote a custom ELF loader to do the relocations. It was interesting but ultimately it was scratched in favor of a large static binary.

would love to see this ecolve into a linux subsystem (RLS/RSL anyone?).

This would be a boon to getting redox on more machines as dev boxes

That's basically just nicer integration, right? Some sort of file sharing between guest and host plus some quick way to get a terminal in the guest, and maybe some sort of GUI forwarding if possible.

that the idea, that would make redox on a framework laptop a serious contender for my daily driver. sure its limited but I have no interest in learning c to do do kernal hacking. I'm learning rust already on the other hand

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