Operating System Development

The GNU Project has announced a major milestone: native 64-bit support for GNU Hurd is now available through GNU Guix.

If you are not familiar with it, let me shed some light. GNU Hurd is the kernel of the GNU operating system. Unlike the Linux kernel, however, Hurd uses a microkernel design based on GNU Mach. Core services run as separate user-space servers that communicate through message passing. Launched in the early 1990s, Hurd has remained largely experimental.

For decades, GNU Hurd was limited to 32-bit x86 systems. The absence of x86_64 support restricted its use on modern hardware. But not anymore. With 64-bit builds now available in Guix, Hurd can run natively on current x86_64 systems.

Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS.

With Genode OS 26.02 they have been working on technical improvements as well as migrating the project away from GitHub and onto Codeberg. An increasing number of open-source projects are moving off of the Microsoft-owned GitHub with not liking the fact that GitHub Copilot and other AI are trained off Git repositories on GitHub, among other concerns. Thus Genode OS is moving to Codeberg.

If you're looking for a Unix-like, POSIX-compatible, real-time kernel, there's no shortage of projects trying to build one. Ironclad stands out for using the Ada programming language and its formally verifiable SPARK subset.

The Ironclad OS project is writing a new Unix-like OS kernel, aimed at small-footprint and embedded systems, and planning to be realtime-capable. For stronger security, it supports Mandatory Access Control (MAC), which is a big-organization style sort of system, as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology describes.

The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July.

Can eBPF be used to modify the list of WiFi networks visible to the user via NetworkManager? Hide some of them, add or modify info of the others....

Or even better, modify it on yet the lower level such that any application that polls the list via system API would receive a modified list.

The is about eBPF only

I want to take aт existing, a standard or one of the popular ones, WiFi driver for Linux and tweak it. I'll inroduce a whitelist into it. That is, to the consumer a driver will show the networks from a whitelist only ignoring all other ones.

It's a PoC. I want to implement it as simply as possible.

Can this be implemented? And how, in a high level?

Intel seems to have gotten "inspired" by ARM and is going to double the GP registers to 32 and implement a push2 and pop2 instructions that move two register values in one operation.

Seems interesting enough.

Recently riscv64 support has been merged in the 5.0 release, perfectly in time for me having time to get back into a project again. I'll be posting a barebones example soon since there is only one for x86.