Show HN: Crazierl – An Erlang Operating System

(crazierl.org)

22 points by toast02 hours ago

2 comments

tombert1 hour ago
I've thought about doing something like this but I am only very recently getting into low-level OS stuff.I can't remember who said this, but they called "Erlang an operating system for your code", and I think that's fairly accurate. When I build an Erlang app, I don't build it the same way as I would with Rust; I have a lot of independent gen_servers that do operate independent from each other.The Erlang VM is (roughly) preemptive multitasking, and even each process has its own GC, so it does feel like it could be a natural fit for its own operating system without having to live on top of Linux.
- calvinmorrison54 minutes ago
 There's some definite prior art here where they worked on that a LOT.<a href="https://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1498583896660864samwilliamshowtobuildanoswitherlang_awhistlestoptourofhydros.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/149858389...</a>
 - toast015 minutes ago
 Unfortunately, the hydros project website is gone. I'm not sure if it moved somewhere.
 - tombert30 minutes ago
 You know, I read those slides when they were new, and I apparently just completely forgot about it.Not that it's not interesting, just that my brain is dumb sometimes.
mixedbit1 hour ago
Is the OS implemented from scratch, or is it a stripped down version of some existing OS?
- toast01 hour ago
 The kernel is pretty much from scratch. It provides a FreeBSD compatible syscall interface for the syscalls that BEAM calls, as well as the FreeBSD runtime loader. I do make healthy use of FreeBSD libraries to provide the OS, you can get an idea of what I pull from the file names in the Makefile [1]. Building an OS is a lot, so I tried to stick to the parts I find fun and interesting. Things like a NIC driver in Erlang [2] (with NIFs to copy to/from device memory). But process / thread creation is original, memory management is original (not necessarily good), time keeping is original, etc. I used existing code and interfaces so I didn't have to write a bootloader, memcpy, and lots of other stuff.[1] <a href="https://github.com/russor/crazierl/blob/main/Makefile#L23" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/russor/crazierl/blob/main/Makefile#L23</a>[2] <a href="https://github.com/russor/crazierl/blob/main/src/rtl_8168.erl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/russor/crazierl/blob/main/src/rtl_8168.er...</a>