ManticoreOS: A research operating system to explore parakernels

Manticore Operating System

A research operating system to explore parakernels .

Table of Contents

Introduction

Manticore is a research operating system, written in Rust, with the aim of exploring the parakernel OS architecture.

The OS is increasingly a bottleneck for server applications that want to take maximum advantage of the hardware. Many traditional kernel interfaces (such as in POSIX) were designed when I/O was significantly slower than the CPU. However, today I/O is getting faster, but single-threaded CPU performance has stagnated. For example, a 40 GbE NIC can receive a cache-line sized packet faster than the CPU can access its last-level cache (LLC), which makes it tricky for an OS to keep up with packets arriving from the network. Similarly, non-volatile memory (NVM) access speed is getting closer to DRAM speeds, which challenges OS abstractions for storage.

To address this OS bottleneck, server applications are increasingly adopting kernel-bypass techniques. For example, the Seastar framework is an OS implemented in userspace, which implements its own CPU and I/O scheduler, and bypasses the Linux kernel as much as it can. Parakernel is an OS architecture that eliminates many OS abstractions (similar to exokernels ) and partitions hardware resources (similar to multikernels ) to facilitate high-performance server application with increased application-level parallelism and predictable tail latency.

Features

• Process scheduling (no kernel threads)
• Hardware resource partitioning
• Virtual memory (no demand paging)
• Kernel-bypass by default
• Non-blocking OS system calls
• ELF executable support

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.