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On Hubris and Humility: developing an OS for robustness in Rust

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On Hubris and Humility: developing an OS for robustness in Rust
Open Source Firmware Conference 2021

On Hubris and Humility: when "write your own OS" isn't the worst idea Hubris is a small open-source operating system for deeply-embedded computer systems, such as our server's replacement for the Baseboard Management Controller. Because our BMC replacement uses a lower-complexity microcontroller with region-based memory protection instead of virtual memory, our options were limited. We were unable to find an off-the-shelf option that met our requirements around safety, security, and correctness, so we wrote one. Hubris provides preemptive multitasking, memory isolation between separately-compiled components, the ability to isolate crashing drivers and restart them without affecting the rest of the system, and flexible inter-component messaging that eliminates the need for most syscalls -- in about 2000 lines of Rust. The Hubris debugger, Humility, allows us to walk up to a running system and inspect the interaction of all tasks, or capture a dump for offline debugging. However, Hubris may be more interesting for what it _doesn't_ have. There are no operations for creating or destroying tasks at runtime, no dynamic resource allocation, no driver code running in privileged mode, and no C code in the system. This removes, by construction, a lot of the attack surface normally present in similar systems. This talk will provide an overview of Hubris's design, the structure of a Hubris application, and some highlights of things we learned along the way.

Speakers: Cliff L. Biffle