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Native Target

The native target allows to run Ariel OS as an OS process. This is especially useful for experimenting without a physical board, testing applications, and for simulation purposes.

Running on Native

The native laze builder is used to compile and run for native:

laze build -b native run

Supported Host Platforms

Currently only GNU/Linux on x86-64 is supported.

Note

Support for other host platforms will be added later.

Supported Functionalities

See the support info of native for details.

Multithreading Behavior

Native itself enables multithreading, and creates one “virtual core” per Ariel OS thread using host threads. This means that threads all run in parallel from the point of view of Ariel OS and of the application.

Networking

Applications that set the network laze module will automatically select the tuntap module, which opens the tap0 tap device (or any other name given in the ARIEL_NATIVE_TUNTAP environment variable) and exchanges traffic through there.

If the device has not yet been created, is in use or otherwise inaccessible, you get this error:

thread '<unnamed>' (...) panicked at src/ariel-os-native/src/lib.rs:
Error opening interface tap0: Operation not permitted (os error 1)

Setting up a suitable interface depends on your platform and preferred configuration:

  • To instruct NetworkManager to create a connection that gets enabled automatically and forward traffic from any uplink interface, run:

    $ sudo nmcli connection add type tun mode tap owner $(id -u) ifname tap0 con-name tap0 ipv6.method shared ipv4.method shared

  • To create a manually managed device that only persists until the next reboot, run:

    $ sudo ip tuntap add dev tap0 user $(id -u) mode tap
$ sudo ip link set dev tap0 up

    Note that for provisioning addresses, you may need to run a DHCP server on that interface, and depending on your application, you may need to set up routing manually.

  • For device-to-device communication between multiple native instances, you can create a bridge and attach one tap device per instance to the bridge; the setup for that is currently beyond the scope of this documentation.

At the time of writing, the tap implementation is limited to Linux.