iot-alex / biscuit

Biscuit research OS

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:

( cd src/ && ./make.bash )

then run Biscuit:

( cd biscuit/ && make qemu CPUS=2 )

Biscuit should boot, then you can type a command:

ls