What does HackerNews think of nebulet?
A proof-of-concept microkernel that implements a WebAssembly "usermode" that runs in Ring 0.
Language:
Rust
Yes, and also this old now archived project which had a similar aim: https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet
WASM could be such an IR unironically https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet. But I doubt that we would be gaining performance/efficiency this way.
This is a super interesting direction. I wrote a wasm OS [0] a few years ago—it didn't go quite that far, but it could've had I spent an additional couple years on it.
I tried this with nebulet (https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet). Unfortunately the MMU cannot be turned off on modern x86_64 processors.
Exokernels coming back would be so cool.
I wrote a prototype kernel/os [0] a few years back that ran wasm in kernel mode. I'd love to see that idea pursued further.
Depends what you call kernel space
For example, nebulet https://github.com/nebulet/nebulet wanted to run everything in ring 0, but "userspace" was WebAssembly code that had been compiled by "kernelspace" to run sandboxed in ring 0
If a CPU architecture was implemented to only offer ring 0, would a microkernel be impossible? Or would we accept this concept of kernelspace/userspace being implemented in software?