Asterinas 0.18 Released For Rust-Written, Memory Safe Linux Alternative OS

In addition to Redox OS continuing to evolve quite nicely for that from-scratch, Rust-based open-source OS, Asterinas OS is also continuing to move forward for that Rust-based operating system striving for Linux compatibility.

Asterinas OS continues to be developed with a state goal "toward a production-grade Linux alternative—memory safe, high-performance, and more" While the Linux kernel has begun embracing Rust code, Asterinas is written in Rust with a modern architecture that aims to combine monolithic kernel performance with microkernel-inspired separation. Asterinas OS implements hundreds of Linux system calls and aims for native compatibility with Linux environments, and as part of that a NixOS build with Asterinas.

With Asterinas 0.18 announced last week, a major focus has been placed on running it as the guest OS for VM-based Kata Containers and Confidential Containers. In turn this led to Asterinas implementing namespaces support, cgroups, various VirtIO features, and more.

This operating system update also brings a new NVMe driver, a re-implemented EXT2 file-system driver, and other updates.

Asterinas also continues working on enabling support for more software packages to run on it, with some of the latest additions being Codex, QEMU, and Firefox.

Those wishing to learn more about this latest Rust-based operating system release can do so via the v0.18 announcement. An Asterinas NixOS x86_64 ISO for testing can be downloaded from GitHub. Development on Asterinas continues to be sponsored by Ant Group, Intel, and various Chinese universities.