Terrarium

Goal: A rust library operating system for hosting web servers, much like MirageOS, except designed for qemu and easy hacking

Subgoals

• Have it be fast and generate tiny binaries
• Have it be easy to hack on and implement drivers
• Have it be easy to swap out the target device (be that baremetal or a cloud VM or whatever)

Non-goals

• Embedded/baremetal considerations (assume we're running on a general purpose hypervisor)
• Reliability (one panic should bring down the entire OS)
• Being practical for any use case other than learning

Milestones

Library operating system basics

1. Read up on MirageOS, Hubris, and HaLVM

Bootloader

1. Understand virtIO
2. Understand r0, and the chocolate-milk and hubris bootloaders
3. Write something that boots in qemu and writes "hi" to the console device using virtIO

Rust background

1. Get a better grasp on rust async (read the async book)
2. Investigate async runtimes
3. Get used to writing nostd

First boot test

1. Hook the rust compiler and the bootloader together (ala mirage's functoria)
2. Something that boots in qemu and writes an rust string to the console

Building libraries

1. Start writing soil (implementing an interface around the virtIO drivers)
2. (?) Write a keyboard driver (in rust) and its soil interface
3. Write an echo program which just takes keyboard input and writes it to display

Http server

1. Write a network driver (in rust) and its soil interface
2. Write a block device driver (in rust) and its soil interface
3. Write an entropy provider driver in soil
4. Write a http/af backend using soil
5. Host a hello world blog post using terrarium