Manticore is a research operating system to explore parakernels.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Getting Started
  • Building from Sources
  • Supported Hardware
  • Code Structure
• Documentation
• Publications
• Contributing
• Authors
• License

Introduction

Manticore is a clean-slate research operating system, written in the Rust programming language, with the aim of exploring the parakernel OS architecture.

Please refer to the project homepage for more information.

Getting Started

Building from Sources

First, install the toolchain, which includes rustup, Rust, and other dependencies:

./scripts/install-toolchain

Now that you have the toolchain installed, you can build Manticore with:

make

The build system generates a kernel.iso image, which you can launch under QEMU with:

$ ./scripts/run kernel.iso

For more information, see Manticore Hacker's Guide.

Running Example Applications

Once kernel.elf is built, you can build an user space echo server with:

$ make -C usr/echod

and launch it under QEMU with:

$ ./scripts/run usr/echod/echod.iso

Supported Hardware

• Legacy-free PC with a 64-bit x86 processor
  • xAPIC2 interrupt controller
  • MSI-X interrupt delivery
  • PCIe 3.0 bus
• VirtIO network device

Code Structure

Manticore's code is structured into different directories as follows:

• arch: machine architecture specific code
• drivers: device drivers
  • virtio: VirtIO device drivers
  • pci: PCIe device drivers
• kernel: kernel services (e.g., process scheduling and system calls)
• lib: support libraries
• mm: memory management (e.g., virtual memory manager and kernel dynamic memory allocator)
• usr: user space libraries and example applications

Documentation

• Manticore Hacker's Guide

Publications

• Pekka Enberg, Ashwin Rao, and Sasu Tarkoma. 2019. I/O Is Faster Than the CPU – Let’s Partition Resources and Eliminate (Most) OS Abstractions. HotOS '19

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome!

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. See Code of Coduct for details.

Authors

• Pekka Enberg

See also the list of contributors who contributed to this project.

License

Licensed under either of these:

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution you intentionally submit for inclusion in the work, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual-licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.