Hyperkernel

See recent updates and contact information at: https://locore.cs.washington.edu/hyperkernel/

This is a playground with kernel designs and ideas for formal verification. Don't use it for production.

How to run hv6

We have tested running hv6 with the following setup:

• Linux Ubuntu 17.10
• Binutils 2.29.1
• GCC 7.2.0
• QEMU 2.10.1

Install these packages before proceeding. Other platforms or versions may not work.

To compile:

make

To run in QEMU:

make qemu

Try a few commands in shell:

ls
ps
pstree
readylist
wttr

By default a web server starts on boot. Point your browser to http://localhost:10080/sh.html.

To run on real hardware, make sure your machine has VT-x (VMX) and VT-d (IOMMU) support and compatible devices (for E1000 we tested using Intel I217-LM). To get an ISO:

make iso

You can use it for PXE booting or creating a bootable USB.

How to verify hv6

We have tested verification with the following setup:

• Linux Ubuntu 17.10
• LLVM 5.0.0
• Z3 4.5.0
• Python 2.7.10

make hv6-verify: Runs the verification scripts for the hv6 kernel. This includes building the kernel into LLVM IR, translating the kernel to Python using Irpy, and invoking hv6/spec/main.py. Individual tests can be run, for example, to run just the sys_set_runnable test, invoke: make hv6-verify -- -v --failfast HV6.test_sys_set_runnable

make irpy/test: Runs the Irpy test suite, which compares symbolic execution results to running the C code directly.

The proof guarantees that the system call handlers are a refinement of our state-machine specification in hv6/spec/. It also shows that the state-machine specification satisfies certain high-level properties, such as process isolation or the correctness of reference counters.

This does not mean that the kernel is guaranteed to have zero bugs. There can be bugs in unverified code (e.g., initialization and glue code), the specification (or things not modeled in the specification), or the verification toolchain including irpy/ and Z3.

The current verification time is roughly 30 min on our test machine (quad-core i7-7700K). This is longer than the number reported in the paper, as we have added more lemmas since then, and several lemmas are unnecessarily proved more than once (the verifier is not smart enough to cache the results).

Directory structure

hv6/: Contains the implementation of the hv6 kernel

hv6/spec/: Contains the specification for the hv6 kernel

irpy/compiler/: Contains the implementation of the IR -> Python compiler used for symbolic execution

irpy/libirpy/: Contains the Python library and resources for performing symbolic execution over Python generated by the Irpy compiler

A few quick pointers:

• syscalls: hv6/syscall.c
• state-machine specification: hv6/spec/kernel/spec/specs.py
• declarative specification: hv6/spec/kernel/spec/top.py
• kernel configuration: kernel/config.h

License

Code borrowed from other sources keeps the original copyright and license.

Files we created are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, viewable at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0, and are marked as such.

In the copyright notices where we refer to "Hyperkernel Authors", we mean Luke Nelson, Helgi Sigurbjarnarson, Kaiyuan Zhang, Dylan Johnson, James Bornholt, Emina Torlak, and Xi Wang.

Acknowledgments

hv6 borrows code from the following sources:

• xv6: many of the source files in the hv6/ directory

• sv6

  • hv6/user/ns.c
  • kernel/tsc.c

• FreeBSD

  • include/uapi/assym.h
  • kernel/intel_iommu.c
  • kernel/intel_iommu.h
  • kernel/svm.c
  • kernel/svm.h
  • kernel/vmx.c
  • kernel/vmx.h
  • lib/stdlib.c
  • lib/string.c
  • scripts/genassym.sh

• Linux

  • include/uapi/machine/trap_support.h

• NetBSD

  • hv6/user/fs/nvmedisk.c
  • include/uapi/nvme.h
  • include/uapi/pcireg.h
  • include/uapi/queue.h

• QEMU

  • include/uapi/e1000.h

• lwIP: files under hv6/user/lwip/ (and user/lwip/)

• ISOLINUX: binaries under boot/isolinux/

• Linux binaries statically linked with uClibc

  • Dune's bench: hv6/user/linux/bench_linux
  • sparse's compile: hv6/user/linux/compile
  • gzip: hv6/user/linux/gzip
  • lua (patched with Linenoise): hv6/user/linux/lua
  • sha1sum: hv6/user/linux/sha1sum
  • tcc: hv6/user/linux/tcc

• Terminus font: hv6/user/linux/ter-x16n.psf

• JavaScript libraries

  • D3.js: web/d3.v4.min.js
  • jQuery: web/jquery.min.js