Xous Core
Core files for the Xous microkernel operating system.
You might find this wiki handy, as well as the Xous Book.
This repository contains everything necessary to build the Xous kernel from source. It consists of the following projects:
- kernel: core memory manager, irq manager, and syscallhandler
- loader: initial loader used to start the kernel
- tools: programs used to construct a final boot image
- docs: documentation on various aspects of Xous
- emulation: Renode scripts used to emulate Xous
- xous-rs: userspace library
Dependencies
- Xous requires its own Rust target,
riscv32imac-unknown-xous-elf
. If you runcargo xtask
from the command line, you should be prompted to install the target automatically if it does not already exist. - You may need to remove the
target/
directory before building, ifrustc
continues to behave like it can't find thexous
target even after it is installed. - If you plan on doing USB firmware updates, you'll need
progressbar2
(updates) andpyusb
(updates). Note thatpyusb
has name space conflicts with similarly named packages, so if updates aren't working you may need to create avenv
or uninstall conflicting packages. - If you are doing development on the digital signatures with the Python helper scripts, you will need:
pycryptodome
(signing - PEM read),cryptography
(signing - x509 read),pynacl
(signing - ed25519 signatures) (most users won't need this). - Some system packages are needed, which can be installed with
sudo apt install libssl-dev libxkbcommon-dev
or similar - If you receive an error about
feature resolver is required
, try installing a newer version ofrustc
andcargo
via rustup
Local-vs-crates.io Verification
By default the xtask
resolver runs a check to confirm that your local files
match the ones referenced in crates.io
. For a handful of core crates, the
build preferentially runs from what is on crates.io
, so local changes have
no effect until they are pushed as an update to an existing crate. If you see
an error complaining about local source files not being published, make sure
you have the correct patches in place in your top level Cargo.toml
file,
and bypass the check with --no-verify
.
Quickstart using Hosted Mode
You can try out Xous in a "hosted mode" wherein programs are compiled for your native platform and are run locally as processes within your current operating system. System calls are replaced with network calls to a kernel that simply shuffles messages around.
Xous uses the xtask convention,
where various complex build commands are stored under cargo xtask
.
This allows for us to create arbitrarily complex build sequences
without resorting to make
(which is platform-dependent),
sh
(which requires a lot of external tooling), or another build
system.
To build a set of sample programs and run them all using the kernel for communication, clone this repository and run:
cargo xtask run
This will build several servers and a "shell" program to control them
all. Most notably, a graphics-server
will appear and kernel messages
will begin scrolling in your terminal.
Hosted Mode UI navigation
Precursor | Host |
---|---|
D-pad middle button | Home |
D-pad up | up arrow |
D-pad down | down arrow |
D-pad left | left arrow |
D-pad right | right arrow |
Quickstart using an emulator
Xous uses Renode as the preferred emulator, because it is easy to extend the hardware peripherals without recompiling the entire emulator.
Download Renode and ensure it is in your path.
For now, you need to download the nightly build,
until DecodedOperation
is included in the release.
Then, build Xous:
cargo xtask renode-image
This will compile everything in release
mode for RISC-V, compile the tools
require to package it all up, then create an image file.
Finally, run Renode and specify the xous-release.resc
REnode SCript:
renode emulation/xous-release.resc
Renode will start emulation automatically, and will run the same set of programs as in "Hosted mode".
Generating a hardware image
To build for real hardware, you must specify an .svd
file. This
file is generated by the SoC build process and describes a single
Betrusted core. These addresses will change as hardware is modified,
so if you distribute a modified Betrusted core, you should be sure
to distribute the .svd
file.
The UTRA abstracts the details of the register
locations, by wrapping them in logical names that don't change.
For Precursor, the SVD files are tracked inside utralib/precursor/soc-<gitref>.svd
.
Since each soc.svd can potentially change with a git reference, a gitref
is coded into the filename by convention.
Generally, one can create an image for hardware using the following command:
cargo xtask app-image
And it will pull from the default soc.svd configuration.
The currently selected config is set by the constant PRECURSOR_SOC_VERSION
in xtask/src/main.rs; it is one of the first constants
near the top.
If you have built your own custom soc.svd file, the most convenient way to update
to this is to simply replace the file referenced in the default with yours,
and then run cargo build
inside the utralib
directory (not in the Xous
root -- the build
command must happen inside the directory to force a
regeneration of the generated UTRA bindings). This will likely result
in a complaint when you run xtask
that your local tree does not match what
is checked into git
; if you are building from your own configuration,
that is correct, and thus you should add --no-verify
to your xtask
command
to suppress the check.
Note that adding a full extra custom gitrev is more involved, it involves editing the utralib/Cargo.toml and utralib/build.rs to reference your new artifact as a brand new feature flag.
The resulting images are in your target directory (typically target/riscv32imac-unknown-xous-elf/release/
)
with the names xous.img
(for the kernel) and loader.bin
(for its bootloader). The corresponding
gateware is in precursors/soc_csr-<gitref>.bin
. These can be written to your
device by following the update guide.
Acknowledgement
This project is funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.