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Biscuit research OS

Biscuit is a monolithic, POSIX-subset operating system kernel in Go for x86-64 CPUs. It was written to study the performance trade-offs of using a high-level language with garbage collection to implement a kernel with a common style of architecture. You can find the research paper about Biscuit here: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-cutler.pdf

Biscuit has some important features for getting good application performance:

  • Multicore
  • Kernel-supported threads
  • Journaled FS with concurrent, deferred, and group commit
  • Virtual memory for copy-on-write and lazily mapped anonymous/file pages
  • TCP/IP stack
  • AHCI SATA disk driver
  • Intel 10Gb NIC driver

Biscuit also includes a bootloader, a partial libc ("litc"), and some user space programs, though we could have used GRUB or existing libc implementations, like musl.

This repo is a fork of the Go repo (https://github.com/golang/go). Nearly all of Biscuit's code is in biscuit/.

Install

The root of the repository contains the Go 1.10.1 tools/runtime. Some of Biscuit's code is modifications to the runtime, mostly in src/runtime/os_linux.go.

Biscuit used to build on Linux and OpenBSD, but probably only builds on Linux currently. You must build Biscuit's modified Go runtime before building Biscuit:

$ git clone https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit.git
$ cd biscuit/src
$ ./make.bash

then go to Biscuit's main part and launch it:

$ cd ../biscuit
$ make qemu CPUS=2

Biscuit should boot, then you can type a command:

# ls

Build with Docker

Don't you have Linux installed on your computer? No worries, you can build the project and run it using docker. You only need to have Docker installed, and run the commands:

docker build -t biscuit .
docker run -it biscuit

Biscuit should boot, then you can type a command:

# ls

Troubleshooting

  • You need qemu-system-x86_64 and python2 in your environment. If your distribution does not name them that way, you have to fix the naming, path, etc.

  • If the GOPATH environment variable doesn't contain biscuit/, the build will fail with something like:

src/ahci/ahci.go:8:8: cannot find package "container/list" in any of:
...

Either unset GOPATH or set it explicitly, for example (assuming that your working directory is where the GNUMakefile is):

$ GOPATH=$(pwd) make qemu CPUS=2