commit: 23f0443eb22c13472efdc3505f87ee6daccdab28
parent 1cc28b4bd0257b5a8dcda1dbc64a4620b21436d0
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 10:28:47 +0200
Big status update!
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+---
+title: Status update, May 2022
+date: 2022-05-16
+---
+
+This was an exciting month: [the Hare programming language] is a secret no more!
+You can now [try out] the programming language I first teased [almost one year
+ago] and [tell me what you think](mailto:sir@cmpwn.com). I hope you like it! I'm
+quite pleased with it so far.
+
+[the Hare programming language]: https://harelang.org
+[try out]: https://harelang.org/tutorials/introduction/
+[almost one year ago]: /2021/03/19/A-new-systems-language.html
+
+One thing Hare has done is allow me to unshelve several projects which were
+blocked pending the availability of a suitable language to write them in. I have
+actually been working on several of these for a while now — and several
+more are to come later — but I couldn't share them thanks to Hare's policy
+of secrecy early in its development. Allow me to introduce you to a few
+projects!
+
+**[Helios]** is a micro-kernel for x86\_64, and ideally later for aarch64 and
+riscv64 as well (and possibly other targets as Hare grows additional ports). We
+have a few things working, such as paging and interrupts, and as of this morning
+we have entered userspace. Next up is rigging up syscalls and scheduling, then
+we're going to start fleshing out an L4-inspired API and writing some drivers in
+userspace.
+
+
+
+[Helios]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/helios
+
+**[Himitsu]** is a secret storage system. It can act as a password manager, but
+it also stores other arbitrary secret data, such as private keys. Each key is a
+set of key/value pairs, some of which can be secret. This allows you to store
+additional data alongside your password (such as your username or email for
+login), and also supports secret data other than passwords — like SSH
+keys. An extensible consent and agent protocols allow you to expand it to
+support a wide variety of use-cases for secure use of secrets.
+
+<video src="https://mirror.drewdevault.com/hissh-agent.webm" muted controls></video>
+
+[Himitsu]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/himitsu
+[Codeberg]: https://codeberg.org
+
+**[btqd]**, or "bittorrent queue daemon", is (going to be) a bittorrent daemon,
+but it is still very early in development. The design is essentially that of a
+process supervisor which manages a queue of torrents and fires up subprocesses
+to seed or leech for a set of active torrents. Each subprocess, such as btlc
+(bittorrent leech client), or btsc (bittorrent seed client), can also be used
+separately from the queue daemon. Further development is blocked on net::http,
+which is blocked on TLS support, for tracker announce requests. I may
+temporarily unblock this by shelling out to curl instead.
+
+[btqd]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/btqd
+
+**[scheduled]** is also early in development. It is a replacement for crond (and
+also [at(1)]) which is redesigned from the ground up. I have never been thrilled
+with cron's design — it's very un-Unix like. scheduled will have better
+error handling and logging, a much more flexible and understandable approach to
+configuration, and a better approach to security, plus the ability to do ad-hoc
+scheduling from the command line. This was designed prior to date/time support
+landing in Hare, and was blocked for a while, but is now unblocked. However, it
+is not my highest priority.
+
+[scheduled]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scheduled
+[at(1)]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/at
+
+---
+
+Each of these projects will spawn more blog posts (or talks) going into greater
+depth on their design goals and rationale later on. For now, with the
+introductions out of the way, allow me to fill you in on the things which got
+done in this past month in particular.
+
+I'll keep the SourceHut news short, and expand upon it in the "what's cooking"
+post later today. For my own part, I spent some time working on [hut] to add
+support for comprehensive account data import/export. This will allow you to
+easily take all of your data out of sourcehut and import it into another
+instance, or any compatible software — your git repos are just git repos
+and your mailing lists are just mbox files, so you could push them to GitHub or
+import them into GNU Mailman, for example. This work is also a step towards
+self-service account deletion and renaming, both prioritized for the beta.
+
+[hut]: https://sr.ht/~emersion/hut
+
+Regarding Hare itself, there are many important recent developments. Over 300
+commits landed this month, so I'll have to leave some details out. An OpenBSD
+port is underway by Brian Callahan, and the initial patches have landed for the
+Hare compiler. The crypto module grew [blowfish] and [bcrypt] support, both
+useful mainly for legacy compatibility, as well as the more immediately useful
+[x25519] and [pem] implementations. There is also a new [encoding::json]
+module,[^extlib] and a number of fixes and improvements have been steadily
+flowing in for [regex], [bufio], [net], [net::uri], and [datetime], along with
+dozens of others.
+
+[blowfish]: https://docs.harelang.org/crypto/blowfish
+[bcrypt]: https://docs.harelang.org/crypto/bcrypt
+[x25519]: https://docs.harelang.org/crypto/x25519
+[regex]: https://docs.harelang.org/regex
+[bufio]: https://docs.harelang.org/bufio
+[datetime]: https://docs.harelang.org/datetime
+[pem]: https://docs.harelang.org/encoding/pem
+[net]: https://docs.harelang.org/net
+[net::uri]: https://docs.harelang.org/net/uri
+[encoding::json]: https://docs.harelang.org/encoding/json
+[^extlib]: Which is likely to be moved to the extended library in the future.
+
+For Himitsu, I developed [hare-ssh] this month to facilitate the addition of
+[himitsu-ssh], which provides SSH tooling that integrates with Himitsu (check
+out the video above for a demo). The "hissh-import" command decodes OpenSSH
+private keys and loads them into the Himitsu keystore, and the "hissh-agent"
+command runs an SSH agent that performs authentication with the private keys
+stored in Himitsu. Future additions will include "hissh-export", for getting
+your private keys back out in a useful format, and "hissh-keygen", for skipping
+the import/export step entirely. Presently only ed25519 keys are supported; more
+will be added as the necessary primitives are added to Hare upstream.
+
+[hare-ssh]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare-ssh
+[himitsu-ssh]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/himitsu-ssh
+
+I did some work on Helios this weekend, following a brief hiatus. I wrote a more
+generalized page table implementation which can manage multiple page tables
+(necessary to have separate address spaces for each process), and started
+rigging up the kernel to userspace transition, which I briefly covered earlier
+in the post. As of this morning, I have some code running in userspace —
+one variant attempts to `cli`, causing a general protection fault (as expected),
+and another just runs a busy loop, which works without any faults. Next steps
+are syscalls and scheduling.
+
+That's all the news for today. Hare! Woo! Thanks for reading, and be sure to
+check out — and maybe contribute to? — some of these projects. Take
+care!
