alt Hacker News> Do you usually publish your hobby code publicly? If not, consider this an appeal to do so (:
Yes; https://github.com/russor/crazierl/ and there's an in browser demo as well https://crazierl.org/demo.html (thanks to v86! https://github.com/copy/v86 ) Supports virtio-net and realtek 8168.
> I take that there aren't any pluggable drivers for NICs like there's for nvme/sata disks?
I mean, there is NDIS / NDISWrapper. Or, I think it wouldn't be too hard to run netbsd drivers... but I'm crazy and want my drivers in userland, in Erlang, so none of that applies. :)
As a fair warning, there's some concurrency errors in the kernel which I haven't tracked down that results in sometimes getting stuck before the shell prompt comes up, the tcp stack is just ok enough to mostly work, and the dhcp client only works if everything goes right.
Erlang! Indeed a crazy idea (in a good way!), and while I'm not normally a big fan of unikernels, now you've got me seriously intrigued :)
I've been dabbling in Erlang and OS development myself, my biggest inspirations being Microsoft Singularity and QNX. The former is a C# lookalike of what you're making, or at least that's how it seems from my perspective.
The readme mentions a FreeBSD-like system call interface, but then the drivers and the network stack are written in Erlang, and, as you've mentioned, run in the user land. Is that actually a unikernel design with BEAM running in the kernel, or more of a microkernel hosting BEAM, with it providing device handling and the user space?