xv6-riscv VS unikraft

okay, fair. i only got misled by the title of the post, which claims all-rust xv6 port.

now that we cleared the userland part, here’s what I’m contemplating on the kernel side. i can’t think of anything simpler and more staple than this, so:

https://github.com/dancrossnyc/rxv64/blob/main/kernel/src/ua...

https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv/blob/riscv/kernel/uart...

honestly - i don’t feel at ease to tell which driver code is more instructional, which is easier to read, which is better documented, which is better covered with tests, which has more unsafety built into it (explicit or otherwise), what size are the object files, and what is easier to cross-compile and run on the designated target from, say, one of now-ubiquitous apple silicon devices.

lest we forget that the whole point of it is “pedagogical”, i.e. to learn something about how a modern OS can be organized, and how computer generally works.

and i’m just not sure.

The x86 version of xv6 is no longer updated, the last updates took place about 7 years ago. Current xv6 supports RISC V in qemu, there are also ports to real RISC V devices (Kendryte/Canaan K210, Allwinner D1, StarFive JH7110, some hacked by me) and FPGA implementations ().

  https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv/ (qemu)

I am no help with recruitment, but simple search revealed "https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv", were you aware of this?

Different repo under same org https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv

I'm reading through the MIT xv6 OS handbook and code (here: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv/) and they mention the fact that they created it as a monolithic kernel since most unix systems are monolithic. They then introduce the microkernel concept. Are there microkernel concepts out there (especially code) I can check out? I'm curious to see how userspace processes communicate to kernel processes to execute privileged actions.

Yeah its from here: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv x86 version here: https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public

I would start with working through an OS textbook. Tanenbaum is highly regarded although I worked through OStep and I felt it was very approachable. Also check out wiki.osdev.org. Also, here's a re-inplementation of Unix version 6. I've been meaning to play around with it for a while.

NOTE: we have stopped maintaining the x86 version of xv6, and switched our efforts to the RISC-V version (https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-riscv.git)

It seemed to be in a similar space to Genode when I had a brief look. Is it clear how it compares?

A system that claims to allow you to configure it in microkernel and other modes might be interesting for comparison of the approaches, but I've only noticed it via a local connexion: https://project-flexos.github.io/

Thanks for the feedback, we're in the process of adding a security section[0] which will detail more on the on-goings, but we'll work on adding more highlights on the main page.

I need to highlight we have separate research[1][2] which will make its way upstream soon which aims to provide hardening between internal libraries (e.g. isolating the network stack or scheduler) using gates like Intel MPK or separate hardware-accelerated services.

[0]: https://github.com/unikraft/docs/pull/32

[1]: https://project-flexos.github.io/

[2]: https://github.com/project-flexos/unikraft