/huckle

This is my Undergraduate thesis at IITM. A Unikernel Web server written completely in Rust.

Primary LanguageRust

What is this project?

A fully functional unikernel web server written completely in Rust. (Why Rust?)

This has no underlying OS library dependencies and is therefore readily deployable on Bare-metal.

Components

  1. A minimal kernel by following this excellent series of blog posts by Phill Oppermann

    • Basic Grub, bootloader, Long mode, Stack​
    • GDT, TSS
    • Paging for memory management with 4 GB of physical memory is mapped

  2. VGA Display screen

  3. PCI to detect ethernet card and other peripheral devices.

  4. PIC 8259 Cascaded master and slave at IRQ 2 line.

  5. Detection of PS/2 controller (interface for keyboard device and PIC) and initialization.

  6. Memory Mapped I/O

  7. Network driver for RTL8139 Ethernet card.

  8. UDP web server capable of exchanging packets.

Install Requirements

Note: I used Ubuntu 16.04 as my development system, so adapt to your own system while installing packages.(I particulary struggled to make this work on a Mac.)

Install qemu, xorriso and nasm

sudo apt install qemu xorisso nasm

Environment Setup

Install Rust from the official website.

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

This will install rustup(the tool chain installer), rustc(the compiler), cargo(the package manager). Now we are using so many functions that are unstable, so we need to use the nightly versions of the compiler and the package manager. Rustup helps in navigating between different versions of rustc and cargo depending on the requirement.

Clone this repository and inside the root folder run the below command to override the version for this specific project.

rustup override add nightly-2017-04-05

You can verify by checking the versions of rustc and cargo. However, there is a lot of activity over Rust in the recent past. So if you are using latest versions, get ready to do some heavy debugging.

rajiv@rajiv-Inspiron-3537:~/huckle$ rustc --version`

rustc 1.18.0-nightly (2564711e8 2017-04-04)

rajiv@rajiv-Inspiron-3537:~/huckle$ cargo --version`

cargo 0.19.0-nightly (4e95c6b41 2017-03-23)

If these versions match, you are good to go!

How to run?

Go to the root directory and run

make iso

make run

Once you are done, clean up the binaries.

make clean

Notes

  • Used Qemu as the hardware emulator as it gives the convenience of specifying the desired hardware

Credits

Long live Open Source!