Ethos

Two years after I last touched the Ethos kernel, I am back at hacking away at what is now referred to as the cardboard Ethos, while we are looking ahead to developing the next incarnation in a safer programming language than C. Right now, that language might be Go.

What is Ethos?

For the moment, I am the architecture and memory management code owner. That effectively means cleaning up the implementation and architecture of code dealing with physical and virtual address space manipulation, scheduling and process management, and other low-lying bits. It took a bit of time to bring myself up to speed with code that I had written just a few years ago (which is kinda sad...), but I place the blame squarely on not having it done cleanly enough the first time (not that that was or is a priority at this stage in the project ;-)). Aside from cleaning up the tree and fixing bugs, I am adding kernel gdb debugging over Ethernet, and hopefully porting Ethos to x64 if work and personal life allow ;-).

Today I've added a stack unwinder / backtrace that can handle stepping over the interrupt context, so that panic logs are more useful than seeing a backtrace up to the exception handler frame.

Now on a BUG() say occuring within the timer interrupt path, you would get something like the following -

Terminating Ethos Kernel
Backtrace:
[0xc00236f0] timer_handler + 21
[0xc000726f] xen_event_handle + ec
[0xc0007b0f] do_hypervisor_callback + a7
[0xc00030a6] hypervisor_callback + 35
-----> Next frame returning from interupt context is kernel space <-----
[0xc0005cc1] memset + 24
[0xc0010e4c] elfLoad + 390
[0xc001221c] scheduleInit + 214
[0xc00156a2] start_kernel + 1dd
[0xc000000e] stack_start + 0