OS2 [WIP]

This is a small hobby OS to play around with stuff I have never done before... it's not intended to be functional, useful, secure, or reliable. It is meant to be approximately fun to implement.

If you want to see the latest things I am up to, check out the dev branch on this repo. Generally, master should compile and run.

WIP

• Start on librs (the equivalent of libc for this project).

  • See user/src/main.rs as an example userspace program.
  • Compile userspace progs with cargo xbuild --target target.json

• Paging

  • memory::paging::map_region
  • Need some way of registering valid memory mappings.
  • Page fault handler should check that register and allocate a new page if needed.

• Zero-copy message passing for IPC. To send a message,

  • Remove from sender page tables
  • Remove from sender TLB
  • Insert page into receiver page tables
  • Allow the receiver to fault to map the page. Process receives message via the normal future polling.

• I am toying with the idea of not having processes at all, just DAGs of continuations which may or may not choose to pass on their capabilities.

Already implemented

Currently its a little over 1500 LOC (not including comments + whitespace + dependencies). Not bad!

• The kernel itself is continuation-based, rather than using something like kthreads. In the first pass, I am just making things work. Later, I might go back and make it efficient.

• No timer-based preemption in kernelspace or userspace (though timer interrupts do occur so that timers can work). No locks, no multi-threading in userspace. Every process is single-threaded and continuation-based. Each Continuation can return a set of additional continuations to be run in any order, an error, or nothing. Continuations can also wait for events, such as I/O or another process's termination.

• Single address space. Everything lives in the same address space. Page table entry bits are used to disable certain portions of the address space for some continuations.

• Small kernel heap for dynamic memory allocation.

• Buddy allocator for physical frame allocation.

• Buddy allocator for virtual address space regions.

• Simple capability system for managing access to resources in the system, such as memory regions.

• Switching to usermode and back.

• System calls via syscall and sysret instructions.

• Loading a position-independent ELF binary as a user-mode task, running it, and exiting via a syscall.

TODO

Now that I have a mostly functioning basic kernel, I can start playing around with stuff!

• Need a coherent programming model... how does a user process load other tasks?
• Need to fill out the set of reasonable events.
• Networking? I've never done that before...

Building

• rust, nightly

  rustc 1.45.0-nightly (99cb9ccb9 2020-05-11)
  

• llvm-tools-preview rust distribution component via rustup component add llvm-tools-preview

• cargo xbuild and cargo bootimage via cargo install cargo-xbuild bootimage

• build-essentials and standard utils: gcc, make, ld, objcopy, dd

• qemu to run

To build and run

$ cd os2/user
$ cargo xbuild --target x86_64-unknown-elf.json --release
$ cd ../kernel
$ bootimage run

bootimage can optionally be passed --release for optimized builds.