Zinnia: A modular 64-bit Unix-like kernel written in Rust

zinnia-os.org

53 points·mrunix··8 comments

Looking through the page and the main readme I have lots of questions...

I'm vaguely curious what is or is not missing for aarch/riscv, also what else is/is not implemented? e.x. is there audio support? can I plug a USB drive in?

Also, Is there a section with documentation on the architecture?

There doesn't seem to be audio support (I searched for audio and sound). There seems to be the beginning of USB support (under drivers/usb/xhci, for example).

Author here. aarch64 is something I haven't looked into yet. Last time I tried, I was able to boot to userspace on a VisionFive2 (riscv64gc), but it's been a while and the port has likely bit-rotted. It's missing a lot of platform drivers since there is no ACPI firmware on those devices. There is no audio yet, but I do plan on porting Pulse with OSS drivers in the future. Regarding USB, I have a local change set with HID on xHCI, but no Mass Storage support.

This first Rust/Zig kernel that allows Linux drivers to be ported over with ease (LLM assisted) could pick up a lot of run-on-bare-metal usage. Linux is the only FLOSS kernel that has broad hardware support.

Run Linux as a guest in KVM to manage the hardware.

You can do something like rump kernel to reuse drivers.

https://rumpkernel.github.io/

Why would that be? To me it doesn't seem that interesting vs going to an l4 type kernel that is mathematically verified secure in various operations.

I think C is hard for newcomers. Zig/Rust have a better story there.

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