Oxide Announces Hubris OS

Oxide announced Hubris, their microkernel OS for embedded systems, and Humility the debugger for it.

As time went on in early 2020 and we found ourselves increasingly forcing existing systems out of the comfort of their design centers, we wondered: was our assumption of using an existing system wrong? Should we in fact be exploring our own de novo operating system?

Instead of having an operating system that knows how to dynamically create tasks at run-time (itself a hallmark of multiprogrammed, general purpose systems), Cliff had designed Hubris to fully specify the tasks for a particular application at build time, with the build system then combining the kernel with the selected tasks to yield a single (attestable!) image.

This is the best of both worlds: it is at once dynamic and general purpose with respect to what the system can run, but also entirely static in terms of the binary payload of a particular application - and broadly static in terms of its execution.

Oxide is working on producing what is basically a rack sized blade server. It's a rack pre-populated with hardware controlled by a single control plane. The rack is meant to be a single, sealed unit, and as such, they needed something which could be embedded into the various controllers in the rack.

Hubris is written in Rust, it's MPL licensed, and there is a GitHub repository.