A lightweight, secure multiprocessor hypervisor written in Rust for RISC-V
This project is maintained by diodesign
Once you have installed a RISC-V Binutils and Rust toolchain, built a boot capsule kernel and filesystem, and compiled a RISC-V-capable version of Qemu, the remaining steps to run the Diosix hypervisor are straightforward. This is deliberately so that once all the various support components are in place, the hypervisor can be built, run, and tested with single commands to make development as smooth as possible.
These instructions assume you know your way around a Linux or Unix-like system, are comfortable using your system’s command-line interface, and are using a Debian-like GNU/Linux operating system. This guide also assumes you have followed the aforementioned processes to ensure you have a toolchain, boot capsule kernel, and Qemu build in place. By now you should have Git and Cargo installed.
First, open a terminal, and fetch the latest Diosix source code, and enter its directory. As is the case throughout this documentation, these instructions will use src within your home directory to organize your projects:
mkdir -p $HOME/src
cd $HOME/src
git clone https://github.com/diodesign/diosix.git
cd diosix
To build the hypervisor for a particular CPU architecture, use cargo build, with <target> specifying the architecture you wish to support:
cargo build --release --target <target>
This not only compiles the hypervisor, it also links the boot capsule kernel, which should contain an initial filesystem, to form the single executable target/<target>/release/hypervisor. If a boot capsule kernel cannot be found, an error will be raised. If no <target> is supplied on the cargo command line, the default, riscv64gc-unknown-none-elf, is used. Essentially, this command generates a build of the hypervisor that can bring up systems, physical or emulated, that use the chosen supported CPU architecture.
Below is a list of supported targets, known as target triples in Rust jargon, and a brief description of the CPU architectures they support:
| Target | Description |
|---|---|
riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf |
Basic 32-bit RISC-V cores (RV32IMAC) |
riscv64imac-unknown-none-elf |
Basic 64-bit RISC-V cores (RV64IMAC) |
riscv64gc-unknown-none-elf |
Fully featured 64-bit RISC-V cores (RV64GC) |
Use cargo clean to delete hypervisor builds, and their intermediate files, while leaving the source code untouched, so that the subsequent build occurs afresh. This command should not normally be necessary and is mentioned here for completeness. If a build unexpectedly fails, trying cleaning it out, and starting again with cargo clean followed by the desired cargo build command.
To go straight to running the hypervisor within the Qemu emulator, use cargo run with a given <target>:
cargo run --release --target <target>
This will automatically build the hypervisor, as described above, if one has not been compiled yet. The hypervisor will run within a Qemu Virt-type system with 512MiB of RAM and four CPU cores, with the terminal connected to the emulated hardware’s serial port for debugging and communication. Press control-a followed by c to open the Qemu command console, and then type q and hit enter to end the emulation. See Diosix’s Qemu documentation for more information on using the emulator.
Finally, to run Diosix’s built-in tests, using Qemu, use, with <target> specifying the CPU architecture:
cargo test --release --target <target>
This will terminate silently with no error, and an exit code of 0, if all tests pass, or a failure code if a test fails. These automated tests are in their infancy; any contributed tests will be most welcome.