This is a lightweight, secure, multithreaded, and multiprocessor container-based hypervisor-microkernel operating system written in Rust for 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-V systems.

It is a work in progress: I'm starting from scratch after previously writing a working microkernel for 32-bit SMP x86 computers in C and assembly.

I learned a lot from that foray, and so this is the second iteration of diosix. Crucially, it will be written in Rust, a C/C++-like programming language that has a fierce emphasis on guaranteed memory safety, threads without data races, and other security features. I chose RISC-V because it's interesting new ground to explore, whereas there are countless x86 and Arm operating system kernels out there.

See the build instructions for step-by-step guides to compiling and running this project. Here's a screenshot of the kernel booting in a 32-bit octo-core Qemu Virt hardware environment, and writing some debug out to the virtual serial port:

The commands to build and run this code:

./build.sh --triple riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf --platform qemu32_virt
qemu-system-riscv32 -machine virt -kernel target/riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf/release/kernel -nographic -smp 8

Press Ctrl-a then c to escape to the Qemu monitor, then q to quit.

There are a number of goals to hit before this can be considered a useful kernel and operating system. Here's a non-complete todo list:

• Update wiki with relevant documentation
• Bring-up for RV32
• Bring-up for RV64
• Kernel level:
  • Physical RAM region management
  • Exception handling
  • Interrupt handling
  • CPU core scheduling
  • Supervisor environment management
• Supervisor level:
  • Physical RAM page management
  • Virtual page management
  • Exception handling
  • Interrupt handling
  • CPU core scheduling
  • ELF executable parsing and loading
  • User environment management

All current development work is done in master and targets RISC-V. The x86 branch holds an early port of the Rust microkernel for Intel-compatible PC systems. The x86hypervisor branch holds an early attempt to build hypervisor features into the x86 branch. You're welcome to update these so they catch up with master, however my focus will be on the RISC-V port.

Feel free to email me, Chris Williams, if you have any questions, want to get involved, have source to contribute, or found a security flaw. You can also find me, diodesign, on Freenode IRC in the #osdev channel, or on Twitter. Ultimately, you can submit pull requests or issues on GitHub.

Copyright © Chris Williams and contributors, 2018. See LICENSE for distribution and use of source code and binaries. A few software components have been imported, modified under license where needed to run within the diosix kernel context, and placed in the src/contrib directory. See the included licences for more details on usage. With thanks to:

• src/contrib/hermit-dtb: Copyright © 2018 Colin Finck, RWTH Aachen University.
• src/contrib/lazy-static.rs: Copyright 2016 lazy-static.rs Developers. Copyright © 2010 The Rust Project Developers.
• src/contrib/hashmap_core: Copyright © 2016 The Rust Project Developers.
• src/contrib/spin-rs: Copyright © 2014 Mathijs van de Nes.
• src/contrib/spin-rs/src/atomic.rs: Reimplements Rust's MIT-licensed core::sync::atomic API. Original implementation: Copyright © The Rust Project Developers.

And thanks to David Craven, Alex Bradbury, and everyone else who brought Rust, LLVM, and RISC-V together; the RISC-V world for designing the CPU cores and system-on-chips in the first place; Michael Clark and everyone else who worked on Qemu and other RISC-V emulators; Philipp Oppermann for his guide to writing kernel-level Rust code; and to the OSdev community for its notes and documentation.