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/.
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
-
You need
qemu-system-x86_64andpython2in 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