FTL: A new operating system for clouds

(ftl-os.org)

64 points | by romac 2 hours ago

15 comments

  • drybjed 2 hours ago
    Is it just a hobby, and won't be big and professional like gnu?
    • trollbridge 24 minutes ago
      Only runs on 80386 since that’s all I have.
    • baron3dl 1 hour ago
      quick, let's find the author's shirtless beer drinking pictures before they get deleted
    • itsanaccount 2 hours ago
      I dont think the kids are gonna get the reference.
      • QuantumNomad_ 4 minutes ago
        I think they will. It’s a pretty famous quote, even among people who were not old enough to see it first-hand at the time when Linus made that Usenet post.
  • aaronbrethorst 9 minutes ago
    Here's the author: https://seiya.me -- he works at Vercel, sounds pretty legit.
  • tamimio 0 minutes ago
    How’s this different from say openbalena?
  • trollbridge 21 minutes ago
    This is actually interesting, since most containers don’t actually need an independent kernel at all. Of course, this moves a container a lot closer to effectively being a chroot jail (but that’s a good thing) + having some capabilities taken away.
  • raggi 5 minutes ago
    parts of the kernel design remind me of zircon (handle oriented objects, vmo's, and so on), but then various lines are cut in different places (kernel knows of threads but not processes, maybe handles slightly higher level networking)
  • ollybee 1 hour ago
    I saw FTL and "new" and got very excited. sadly is is not the game.
  • sigbottle 42 minutes ago
    What does "OS" for clouds mean?

    Does this mean you still delegate to something like KVM/paravirtualzation for your device models, but your FTL guest OS can run multiple secure workloads inside a VM?

    Or are you designing a custom OS from the ground up to run on native hardware? What constraints are you putting on hardware support to make this a tractable that's not re-implementing all of the stuff that linux has? I assume that's why it's advertised for the "cloud", because you know a priori the deployment machines you're gonna run on? Or is hardware support known by kernel devs to be a (relatively) trivial problem in the OS space, compared to the user-facing features (like processes, scheduling, memory management, etc)?

    Or is the bet that microkernel = win = can implement everything linux has and more?

    I'm curious about the eventual end goal for the project is, not just what currently exists (as otherwise the answer currently seems to be sentence 1)

  • mrtesthah 1 minute ago
    MirageOS also bills itself as an OS in a library — is this similar?

    https://mirage.io/

  • romac 2 hours ago
    FTL v0.1.0 was just released, adding async Rust support (multi-thread Tokio runtime) and lots of missing pieces in the Linux compatibility layer.

    (not my project)

  • tekacs 2 hours ago
    Sounds kinda like gVisor more than Unikraft? With a maybe-faster intercept path?
    • eranation 1 hour ago
      That was my first thought. I think adoption will increase if projects will have a clear FAQ about prior / related work, and not leave this to the reader (human or AI) to figure out.
    • convolvatron 50 minutes ago
      I think it's a kind of like both? it runs as its own guest, but instead of implementing syscalls that are 1:1 with linux, it looks like linux runs as a library, and uses a different more pared down set to take a normal sys call path to the guest. so my guess is not cheaper at all, since instead of the gvisor syscall->vmexit for the common path, its maybe process->sys call to guest->vmexit to hypervisor.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 1 hour ago
    So it's a microkernel...ish? And it runs Linux programs and supports enough features to serve its own website. Excellent; I hope it takes off.
  • dekdrop 1 hour ago
    written in rust, doesn't say written in rust on the site - i guess that phase is over
    • habitue 1 hour ago
      Now people just wonder why you didn't write it in rust
      • dexterdog 39 minutes ago
        Especially when you can just ask for that in your prompt
      • boredatoms 21 minutes ago
        I mean starting a new project in C or C++ does kinda need a defensible reason at this point, at least in any corporate environment
  • rvz 1 hour ago
    Maybe it is time to look at other new operating systems that are more memory safe by default and don't have any legacy bloat.

    Now that we have a KVM 0day + VM escape vulnerability [0] right now.

    [0] https://x.com/PaulosYibelo/status/2106378929158135903

  • IshKebab 2 hours ago
    Is this a unikernel? Your ASCII art diagram is broken.
    • boguscoder 53 minutes ago
      Fwiw diagram renders OKay in Brave on iOS
    • convolvatron 1 hour ago
      having looked at the briefly, is really a kernel that's meant to take system calls. I think the unikernel terminology is kinda broken. it's explicitly pared down to talk to a hypervisor rather than supporting a lot of hardware drivers. is a unikernel something you link in like a library? then its not. is a unikernel something that's intended to support a single process? then sure.
  • pmkary 1 hour ago
    What a nice thing!