Writing an OS Kernel in a Strictly and Statically Typed Language

  • Authors:

  • Toshiyuki Maeda;Akinori Yonezawa

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo,;Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo,

  • Venue:
  • Formal to Practical Security
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

OS kernels have been written in weakly typed or non typed programming languages, for example, C. Therefore, it is extremely hard to verify even simple memory safety of the kernels. The difficulty could be resolved by writing OS kernels in strictly typed programming languages, but existing strictly typed languages are not flexible enough to implement important OS facilities (e.g., memory management and multi-thread management facilities). To address the problem, we designed and implemented TALK , a new strictly and statically typed assembly language which is flexible enough to implement OS facilities, and wrote an OS kernel with TALK. In our approach, the safety of the kernel can be verified automatically through static type checking at the level of binary executables without source code.