OCaml on Baremetal Shakti RISC-V processor · KC Sivaramakrishnan
BRANK

29 Mar 2019It has been 3 months since I joined IIT Madras and it has been good fun so far. Along with the members of the RISE group, we’ve initiated a project to build secure applications on top of secure extensions of the open-source Shakti RISC-V processor ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, my language of choice to build the applications is OCaml. Given the availability of rich ecosystem of libraries under the MirageOS library operating system for building unikernels, we hope to minimise the amount of unsafe C code that the hardware has to contend with and protect exploits against. As a first step, we have managed to get OCaml programs to run on directly on top of the Shakti processor running in simulation under QEMU and Spike ISA simulators without an intervening operating system.A custom bootloader performs the necessary hardware initialisation and transfers control directly to the OCaml program. We have open-sourced all of the tools necessary to build your own kernel. This handy dockerf…

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Related Topics: OCaml