Developing Diosix: An open-source RISC-V bare-metal hypervisor from scratch in Rust | British Computer Society Open Source Specialists

Diosix bridges two interesting and emerging worlds of technology: Rust and RISC-V. As a bare-metal, type-1 hypervisor, Diosix strives to bring the security, reliability, and speed of Rust to the lowest levels of RISC-V systems. The result is the ability to run multiple guest operating systems, each secured within their own hardware-enforced virtualized environments, on a single RISC-V host. This allows developers to build and test iterations of system and application software without having to reflash and reboot their in-development hardware, as well as run a mixture of isolated guests. This presentation will walk through the architecture of Diosix, how it uses base RISC-V features to provide hardware-enforced virtualization, its progress in running guest operating systems such as Linux, and the project’s next steps. Source code and documentation can be found here. Chris is a San Francisco-based technology journalist at The Register, a publication that covers enterprise IT, information security, and software development. He has worked in the media for the past 15 years as a writer and editor, and his background is in electronic engineering. To keep up with changes in the industry, Chris writes and shares open-source software in his spare time.