Re: [HelenOS-devel] making HelenOS useful
Jakub wrote" "You can also mount a filesystem from a normal disk, such as ATA or USB mass storage, make modifications, unmount and the data will be there for the next mount. " Yes, but after the reboot you need to mount it manually or modify the init program to do that for you. In other words, yes, you can get persistent directory that is available upon reboot in HelenOS with just a tiny modification + rebuild. For your use case that shouldn't be a problem since you'd me making modifications to the system anyway. What I meant is that for a casual user this would be unacceptable: to have to recompile the OS just to get a persistent file system. Cheers, Jiri ___ HelenOS-devel mailing list HelenOS-devel@lists.modry.cz http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
Re: [HelenOS-devel] making HelenOS useful
Thank you for helping me understand the goals of HelenOS. Knowing the limits of posix compliance helps. A working python helps, regardless of version. A simple web server is easy to write, and I could do that. I could also write a DNS server. While SSH may not be the best solution, I'd say that it is practical. I don't know that I could easily write one from scratch, but perhaps port OpenSSH or a simpler ssh. But all that's for naught if there's not a writable file system. I am not familiar enough with the internals of HelenOS to know what is required to achieve this. Perhaps, then, this ought to be a higher priority than the issues I had previously mentioned. For now, I am going to use OpenBSD as the non-Linux alternative for my group, and let other groups in the company use it as they see fit. I like the Microkernel architecture of Minix3 & HelenOS, but Minix3 lacks some features needed and HelenOS hasn't developed to the point where I can use it, yet. Regards, Robert Keyes ___ HelenOS-devel mailing list HelenOS-devel@lists.modry.cz http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
Re: [HelenOS-devel] making HelenOS useful
Hi, thanks for your question, I'll try to reply from my perspective: "What's required to get the ball rolling? As I see it, applications needed " That depends on what you want to do with the OS. We don't have a single intended purpose for HelenOS, so depending on your use case (desktop, embedded, sever in a VM,...) you will need different things. One missing piece that is common perhaps to many use cases is there is a gap in the installation/boot process where we basically always run from a ROM image or live CD image and there is not a ready-made solution for installation to disk / having persistent storage, meaning e.g. if there were any configuration files, they would not persist across reboots. "" "are 1) SSH client and server 2) http server with TLS support 3) python " > I work for the infosec department of a very large corporation and am > trying to provide an alternative to the CentOS and Ubuntu which currently > make up the vast majority of the VMs we run. So it seems to me you would like to do something like run a simple server (e.g .some web application) in a VM. Then what you're saying makes sense, you would also want the HTTP server to be able to display non-static pages (e.g. python CGI scripts or something like that). Jakub had the idea of hosting microkernel.info from a HelenOS VM. Currently you can telnet into HelenOS (albeit it is somewhat limited). Inside HelenOS you have nterm, but that cannot be used as a full fledged telnet client. Sure, there is no security. The web server is very very primitive, only serving static pages and no TLS. Python is there though not sure how much of it works and how obsolete the version we have is. "Some of these can be ported, but I worry about the limited POSIX compliance getting in the way. I have just today discovered HelenOS, so if I am misinformed about what's available, please politely correct me, with details." HelenOS is not meant to be a UNIX-like OS. That said, we have three compilation environments available for applications: - HelenOS native (code which his part of HelenOS builds in this) - should provide (a subset of) ISO C library + HelenOS specific stuff - XCW - for multiplatform applications that want to support HelenOS natively as one of their platforms - ISO C library + HelenOS specific stuff - Coastline/harbours/libposix - libposix provides an (imperfect) emulation layer that should make it possible to port existing applications running on unixish operating systems with minimum changes (e.g. we don't implement fork ()) So I think we're okay here. It's been my stance that HelenOS is not another kernel to run the GNU stack on top of, but rather different (think Windows or BeOS), aming to give a rather different user experience. Therefore we'd like (and need to) write our own basic applications, rather than porting things like coreutils (since our file system works differently), vim (since our user experience should be different). Even SSH is a poor match for HelenOS since HelenOS console works differently from the UNIX terminal. You'd get much better experience using a remote terminal/protocol that explicitly supported HelenOS. Still we'll probably need to support SSH protocol as a n alternative because it's so widely adopted. Best regards, Jiri ___ HelenOS-devel mailing list HelenOS-devel@lists.modry.cz http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
Re: [HelenOS-devel] making HelenOS useful
Forwarding my reply to the list... Forwarded Message Subject: Re: [HelenOS-devel] making HelenOS useful Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2018 09:05:25 +0200 From: Jakub Jermář To: r...@andromedaresearch.com On 06/28/2018 04:56 AM, r...@andromedaresearch.com wrote: > What's required to get the ball rolling? As I see it, applications needed > are 1) SSH client and server 2) http server with TLS support 3) python Work and getting the foundations of the system right. > Some of these can be ported, but I worry about the limited POSIX > compliance getting in the way. I have just today discovered HelenOS, so if > I am misinformed about what's available, please politely correct me, with > details. There is a repository with third-party libraries and applications that were made to run on HelenOS, which already includes Python: https://github.com/HelenOS/harbours So porting POSIX applications is possible, but takes some energy. Note that POSIX-compatibility is a non-goal for HelenOS and in some case might even conflict with the design of HelenOS. On the other hand, compatibility on the standard C library level _is_ a goal. > I work for the infosec department of a very large corporation and am > trying to provide an alternative to the CentOS and Ubuntu which currently > make up the vast majority of the VMs we run. Porting third-party software is currently not our focus as we are still working on the foundations and are tweaking the programming interface a lot (e.g. the capability system, the threading model, resource management etc.). At this point, there might simply be better options for replacing Linux VMs in production. Jakub ___ HelenOS-devel mailing list HelenOS-devel@lists.modry.cz http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
