Redox Support

[MggMuggins]

Hi, I'm a contributor to RedoxOS and have been thinking about working on init for the past year or so as real life sorta took over. I dove into getting rustysd running as a normal application on Redox today, and have read through all your notes on the subject.

So far I've been working my way up the dependency tree to try and get to actually compiling rustysd. I talked to AdminXVII (who ported nix) and I'm just pulling his branch for the time being. I also had to [replace] time, there's a redox fork which supports 0.1 until chrono updates its dependency. Still running into issues with signal-hook, due to a couple of missing symbols in libc.

My understanding is that there is some magic that connects libc to relibc during compilation so that relibc is the backend of libc, so you can make libc calls in your program without needing to depend on relibc directly. Given that, I think it may not be too difficult to get things to compile initially, and then it's a bunch of debugging. For that, redoxer should be helpful.

Essentially I opened this issue so that we can get some dialog going and hopefully see rustsd running on Redox soon.

[KillingSpark]

Very nice! It's certainly good to have someone with deeper knowledge on redox agreeing that rustysd shouldn't be too hard to get running.

If chrono becomes too big of a problem rustysd could also use another logger on redox. I think that is the only place where it's used. Unfortunately I don't exactly know how redox handles the relibc/libc stuff.

Please keep me updated if you hit any roadblocks / get it running successfully!

[MggMuggins]

Will do. I've ended up needing to make some additions to relibc where things aren't implemented in order to get things to compile, I have no idea whether most of it will work. We shall see.

[MggMuggins]

@KillingSpark The branch of nix with redox support is based on something past 0.15.0 and there's a little API breakage in there. Would you be willing to update the deps here (specifically bump nix to 0.16.1) so that your codebase just works with that branch?

[cdbattags]

Link to that branch for the curious?

[MggMuggins]

The branch branches after 0.16.1, just checked. https://github.com/AdminXVII/nix/tree/add-redox-support-bis

[cdbattags]

@MggMuggins any idea if @AdminXVII is going to be looking to upstream this work?

[AdminXVII]

@cdbattags I'm periodically rebasing the branch to try and merge it upstream. Nix is taking quite some time to merge the PR, though. I will try to re-ping the maintainer soon.

[AdminXVII]

Here's the PR: https://github.com/nix-rust/nix/pull/1098

[KillingSpark]

@MggMuggins I will bump the nix to the newest version when I get to it, upgrading nix shouldn't take too much time

[KillingSpark]

c03f1e83cf56af05587e3b2487d9203841b27ced bumped the nix version to 0.16.1

[KillingSpark]

@AdminXVII Any idea why your PR isn't getting merged? I'd like to see how this works out :)

[AdminXVII]

@KillingSpark They want to try to compile Redox to debug I think. The thing is that they are on BSD and the compilation isn't really smooth on non-linux systems.

[KillingSpark]

Hi just doing a bit of cleanup. It's been a while and I'll be honest, redox support isn't high on my TODO list. Is this issue still relevant?

[MggMuggins]

I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about Redox much since I've been at university; I think they've made some substantial progress in terms of compatibility. There was some change in std that made porting crates a lot easier. It's possible Rustysd would work without much modification. Could be an interesting use case.

But I'm not working on anything for Redox right now (nor planning on it), so certainly not a priority.