The rxv64 Operating System: MIT's xv6, in Rust, for SMP x86_64 machines | Hacker News Reader

The rxv64 Operating System: MIT's xv6, in Rust, for SMP x86_64 machines

github.com

140 pointslproven52 comments

One thing I really like about rxv64 is pretty easy to be built on MacOS, without having to built a custom GCC, like the original xv6.

Of course, there are other various "Rust xv6" forks and unfortunately they won't compile with recent Rust...

> easy on macOS

afaik macOS currently targets two architectures. just how smooth is the apple silicon ride, i wonder?

My experience has been that in general LLVM + Rust do a very good job of making cross compilation painless. There is unpleasantness when cross compiling from an Apple host, but that's almost entirely limited to actually compiling rustc and some of the host tools. In terms of smoothing those edges over I think most of the patches I've submitted will land in 1.73 or 1.74.

With that in mind if rxv64 is easy enough to build on an Intel Mac, then it should do fine on an ARM Mac as well.

Obviously if you're talking about porting rxv64 to an ARM host, that's a whole different ball of wax.

No idea how to do it on ARM MacOS, I'm still on Intel. Here's how to built it (had some discussions with the author on Twitter):

https://gist.github.com/anta40/4625d6a2752551aada9c91a72e787...

Done. Will try on M2 Mac probably in the next 2 weeks

It's targeting just amd64, so depends on how smooth you consider emulating it on ARM to be. (eg https://github.com/dancrossnyc/rxv64/blob/main/kernel/src/sw... )

How is the code size vs the C version?

as of yet, it doesn’t shine quite as bright as current C/rv64 original.

but as they say, a long road begins with a single step.

Is there a reason why mkfs is still in C?

C is a better language for this kind of stuff.

"better" is subjective.

Why?

Surely the same exact argument is equally true for mkfs and everything else in the repo? Or is there something special about it?

I would imagine "nobody got around to rewriting it yet" is the most likely reason? mkfs is a fairly simple procedure on the surface: you take a couple basic parameters, and bang out some bits onto a block device. The on-disk data structures likely come from a header file/crate shared with the kernel.

The actual dragons live in the FS driver.

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