> Of course, rewriting and existing kernel stepwise would be interesting, if possible.
Perhaps it's possible to write a new kernel in Rust, and have it be backwards compatible with Linux, by "wrapping" the Linux kernel and drivers in sandboxes?
So a Rust kernel with some kind of built-in environment isolation, in which it can run the real Linux kernel. The running Linux kernel would then access physical hardware through a wrapper in the Rust kernel, while the Rust kernel would access hardware directly.
That's really the only way I see this project gaining widespread adoption: by leveraging Linux. Linux simply has too much momentum to be replaced with something non-compatible.
Of course, a Rust kernel could be useful for all kinds of things other than replacing Linux. Like a Mirage OS-type kernel that uses Rust to write drivers in Rust (instead of OCaml).
for an overview of what's going on in this area. If you're running containers on a hypervisor, with files on storage servers elsewhere, most of the Linux kernel is dead weight. Most of the kernel can be replaced by a modest glue library. Here's one, written in OCaml: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
As containers catch on, we'll see more systems specialized to run nothing but containers. They will be much simpler than Linux or Windows. System administration will be external, as it is for cloud systems like Amazon AWS now.
This is vaguely the idea behind Joanna Rutkowska and co.'s Qubes: there are lots of Linux kernels in different Xen domains, one for each class of userspace apps (banking, gaming, etc.) and one for each low-level service (networking, graphics, etc.). For instance, if the Linux kernel is vulnerable to a local privilege escalation, and the DHCP client is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution, on a traditional system, anyone on the other side of your Ethernet cable can root your machine. Under Qubes, all they can do is root the Xen domain that's providing networking -- but that's not significantly more power than they had than by being on the other end of your network cable, since that domain does nothing other than networking.
I'm not convinced that Linux is unkillable, though. This thread is about OS X, I'm typing this on an OS X machine, etc. I suspect that if you do a good job of working with people's hardware (Apple has an advantage, of course), you can run Chrome, and you can run anything that's portable between OS X and Linux, you can get pretty far.
While it's true that Rust would help here, it is very unlikely that a Rust kernel project would get as far as e.g. Linux and let alone replace it.
Of course, rewriting and existing kernel stepwise would be interesting, if possible.
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