Spunky - Part 2: The Signals, The FOSDEM, and The Repository

In this series of articles I'll illustrate a hobby project of mine that is trying to create a kernel for Genode written in Ada 2012. This project is not about writing a kernel from scratch but rather successively take parts from the existing base-hw kernel and translate them to Ada. Thus, the design mainly follows the approach taken with base-hw. To be able to test the already translated parts, I link them together with the remaining parts from base-hw. The interfacing between the Ada and the C++ parts is done on the level of object methods. Over time, the code base of the new kernel will become more and more Ada and less C++. Maybe later this work will also lead to some formal verification with SPARK. But for now, I'm happy with Ada. So let's go!

You can find the code behind this article on my Github branch. If you're interested in the recent state of my work, you may have a look at the Github issue. You also might want to read the former articles of this series:

A thing about generics and incomplete types

The base-hw signaling requires queues, so, I wanted to be able to re-use my Ada implementation of queues from the RPC module. So far, this was not done as Ada generic and therefore still bound to the RPC use-case. But while changing this, I hit a strange-looking compilation error:

run-time library configuration error file s-finmas.ads had semantic errors entity "System.Finalization_Masters.Finalization_Master" not available run-time configuration error entity "System.Soft_Links.Abort_Undefer" not defined

It turned out that the Genode Ada/SPARK runtime was yet missing "finalization", a feature required for specializing a generic with an incomplete type. But there was no way around: My queued objects use the queue-item type as member, so, they cannot be fully declared before the specialization of the queue. At the other hand, implementing finalization seemed to be complicated as well.

Fortunately, there was Johannes Kliemann who knows the Ada/SPARK runtime of Genode way better than me and didn't give up looking for a solution. In the end he found this little pragma that tells the compiler to simply skip finalization at all:

pragma Restrictions (No_Finalization)

And indeed, this worked like a charm. Thanks again at this point to Johannes! Generic queues: On board.

How to deal with kernel objects?

In contrast to the RPC state machine, signal contexts and signal receivers are also managed as kernel objects referenced by capabilities in the userland. Therefore, they inherited this aspect. The kernel-object management, in turn, made use of the fact that the kernel-object aspect was always applied through inheritance. However, for the translation to Ada, this was impractical. I decided to turn the kernel-object aspect into a member of the affected classes. This required a broader modification of the kernel, but, at the other hand, also base-hw itself benefits from simpler inheritance hierarchies.

The rest of the preparing modifications to base-hw were about minor things like avoiding non-const methods with return values, pointer arguments, and virtual functions.

A new base-repository

Finally, having the signaling in Ada working (no big problems here, again), I wanted Spunky to move to a directory it could call its home and relieve base-hw from all the mixed-in and premature hacks for building Spunky. In the beginning, I extracted a minimal set of Make files from base-hw from which I created a self-standing core-spunky target for the build system. Now, the Ada files could be moved to base-spunky. Finally, I tried to get rid of all remaining obstacles in base-hw that should not enter mainline. It went surprisingly well and base-spunky now contains a collection of only a hand full of files (mostly Ada). Wherever an Ada-version is still missing, files from the base-hw directory are incorporated. Base-hw, on the other hand is now free from Spunky-specific code and can be used as usual again.

Some small adaptions to the Genode tooling for build directories and the execution of test scenarios made developing with Spunky as comfortable as with other kernels. You can give it a try if you like - just check out my topic branch, create a new x86_64 build directory, go to the build directory, enable the line

REPOSITORIES += $(GENODE_DIR)/repos/libports'

in etc/build.conf (for the Ada run-time), and type:

KERNEL=spunky BOARD=pc make run/log

Of course, Spunky can do a lot more: In principal, all you can do with base-hw on x86_64 is likewise supported by Spunky!

Spunky at the FOSDEM 2020

I hope you enjoy my approach with Spunky and the articles about it. If you would like to know more about it, the FOSDEM 2020 in Brussels will be a great place! Spunky will have it's own talk there (presented by me) in the Ada/SPARK Devroom. Maybe we'll meet there. If not, you can also watch the stream of the presentation online ;)

To be continued...