Hacker News Reader

Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

I am very fond of the idea of a from-scratch userspace written entirely in Go. I've been dreaming of building something like gokrazy for servers. Or possibly something like Bottlerocket OS in Go.

I experimented a few weeks ago with packaging a custom kernel and minimal Go init binary into a disk image bootable on GCE. No bootloader needed, just EFI loading the kernel directly.

View on HN

Talos Linux basically implements their entire userspace in Go and its similar to BottleRocketOS, because it is designed to host Kubernetes.

https://www.talos.dev/ https://github.com/siderolabs/talos

Wow cool, thanks.

Another project that aims to deliver this is Linuxkit (https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit). All the components they ship are written in memory safe languages (usually Go) and run as containers under containerd. You can build a custom image very easily, fully defined as a YAML file.

There is also u-root which is "A fully Go userland with Linux bootloaders! u-root can create a one-binary root file system (initramfs) containing a busybox-like set of tools written in Go." https://github.com/u-root/u-root

To some extent, android is this with java.

For a low-powered device, would a Go usespace bring particular benefits? (Though, even the cheapest phones today aren't really "low-powered" anymore)

Go has memory safety (via GC rather than fancy ownership, but if it works it works); that's an asset anywhere that can afford the overhead.

Edit: In order to preempt the argument others are having: Safer than C, anyways, while being much easier than rust.

If only we didn't need the const dance for enumerations, even Pascal like ones, to yet another 10 years, I guess.

I don't have a big problem using codegen to get "syntax" for enumerations. "go generate ./..." before you checkin, save yourself some typing.

I have used this in the past:

https://github.com/abice/go-enum

But mostly use protos as much as possible these days. (The enum is going to be in the API, might as well use the same object inside the app.)

I left that kind of gimmicks behind me in C++ compilers for MS-DOS.

There are USB security keys running Go bare metal,

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

Look for TamaGo on the page.

Same - I've been playing around with Unikernels for the same reason. Running my web server as the only process on the machine really appeals. Attack surface is tiny, basically non-existent. If the web server falls over, reboot the machine (which should be fast because it only has to load the kernel & the Go program).

It's basically the opposite of containers, which I like hehe.

Interesting. Which unikernel do you use?

I've been looking at a few.

https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv

https://ops.city/ (also nanovms) - this is one that I actually got working to at least demo state

Interesting, and thanks.

I didn't know about those. I kind of thought you may have used MirageOS, which I had read about earlier. It is done in OCaml.

https://mirage.io/

That's fascinating, thanks for the link. But I'm coding in Go, and it looks like (from skimming the docs) that MirageOS only works with OCaml. I'll have to look further.

Welcome. Yes, IIRC it is written in and only works with OCaml.

See TamaGo, https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

Or TinyGo, https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/microcontrollers/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com