Friday, December 31, 2021

OS of Interest: Hubris

 Hubris is a fledgling operations system by Oxide Computer Computer.  They are developing it de novo (as Bryan Cantrill would say, and probably has) for use in the control systems of their new server hardware.  It's an embedded OS suitable for MCU's with memory protection hardware.  To quote Bryan:

When we started Oxide, we knew we were going to take a fresh look at the entire system. We knew, for example, that we wanted to have a true hardware root of trust and that we wanted to revisit the traditional BMC. We knew, too, that we would have our own system software on each of these embedded systems, and assumed that we would use an existing open source operating system as a foundation. However, as we waded deeper into these embedded systems and especially their constraints of security and robustness we found that what we wanted out of the existing operating systems wasn't necessarily what they offered (or even wanted to offer).

Cliff Biffle seems to be the chief designer.