stardustos / stardust-oxide

Rust-based Unikernel

stardust-oxide

Features

• Console driver with log support
• Page frame mapping and table generation (using buddy_system_allocator as global allocator)
• Grant table creation/destruction
• XenStore interface
• XenBus interface
• Simple async executor
• Network driver using smoltcp for TCP/IP stack

Usage

Requirements

Building and running stardust-oxide requires:

• Rust toolchain (latest nightly)
• C compiler
• Xen hypervisor and associated headers

The recommended way to install Rust is with rustup. The rust-toolchain file in the repository root will ensure the correct toolchain version is installed and used (therefore the toolchain and components selected during installation do not matter).

The required packages can be installed on Ubuntu with:

$ sudo apt install -y clang xen-system-amd64 libxen-dev

The host machine must be restarted to boot into the hypervisor with the original Debian/Ubuntu installation now running as the Domain 0 virtual machine.

Building

Executing cargo build in the repository root will build all three crates including the stardust kernel binary.

Running

Executing cargo run will call the run.sh script which generates the configuration for the Xen virtual machine then uses xl to start it.

Structure

This project is a Cargo workspace consisting of three crates.

stardust

Main crate that produces a kernel binary and contains the start_kernel entrypoint function.

xen

Contains safe interfaces to the xen-sys that could be used to write any guest Xen kernel.

xen-sys

Contains Rust bindings to the Xen C headers using bindgen.

stardust-oxide's Issues

Block operation fails to return control

schedule_operation(Command::Block) yields control but never returns back control even after an event is processed.

Build and deploy documentation to GitHub Pages

Viewing crate documentation, especially xen and xen-sys, should be made as easy as possible.

Re-enable background XenBus task

To merge #20 the background task was disabled and a single blocking request function is used which internally spins until the response is received.

request should instead be async and sleeps until the background task receives a response at which point it can be woken. This would require implementing the Waker behaviour for the scheduler so was avoided for now.

Improve console performance

Improves console write performance between 20x and 60x

Original implementation wrote text byte by byte and yielded until buffer was flushed before continuing.

New implementation fills buffer and issues send events.