Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

I'm interested in these kind of kernels to run very high performance network/IO specific services on bare metal, with minimal system complexity/overheads and hopefully better (potential) stability and security.

The big concern I have however is hardware support, specifically networking hardware.

I think a very interesting approach would be to boot the machine with a FreeBSD or Linux kernel, just for the purposes of hardware as well as network support, and use a sort of Rust OS/abstraction layer for the rest, bypassing or simply not using the originally booted kernel for all user land specific stuff.

Couldn't you just boot the Linux kernel directly and launch a generic app as pid 1 instead of a full blown init system with a bunch of daemons?

That's basically what you're getting with Docker containers and a shared kernel. AWS Lambda is doing something similar with dedicated kernels with Firecracker VMs