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HAVK

HAVK is an x86-64 operating system and kernel created with Ada (SPARK subset). It focuses on security (and only that) via writing minimal code and using formal verification techniques to help achieve program correctness. It is influenced by Unix, but it is not necessarily a Unix clone.

What can it do right now?

It currently has a primitive task scheduler and a functional user mode where you can load your own x86-64 programs. What remains is to create more system calls and expand what tasks can do so they can be meaningful.

Expect it to do nothing until I decide to release the first major version, as it is still under heavy development.

Goals

This exists so I can experiment with intriguing security concepts such as capabilities and play around with how programs in ring 3 interact with anything in ring 0, with the main goal being how much I can harden and lockdown the entire operating system itself for fun.

I am more interested in any unique ideas you may have to do with operating system security as opposed to code contributions; however, issues and pull requests are very welcome, especially bug fixes.

The end goal is to get a text-based web browser working at the very least, so one could consider this a nearly featureless but usable OS. There are no goals to port this to other platforms/architectures at this stage.

Software requirements

There are a few mandatory software requirements:

  1. GNAT Community. GCC can compile Ada and the package contains the GNAT Project Manager tools, along with GNATprove for SPARK. There's a script inside the "tools" folder which you can utilise to obtain GNAT Community 2021. You can also modify the Makefile.
  2. GNU Make. This is pretty obvious.
  3. GNU-EFI. The bootloader I created uses UEFI to boot HAVK, not BIOS.
  4. GNU Mtools & GNU Parted. Used for creating a hard drive image.

Clone this repository, install those requirements, and enter make to create a hard drive image inside "build" called "HAVK.img". Then, simply dd it to a USB flash drive or install QEMU (qemu-system-x86_64) to emulate HAVK in a VM by performing make qemu.

You can also recreate the proof by executing make proof.

Hardware requirements

There's a few hardware requirements, but they are all critical right now:

  1. An x86-64 system that has a working display/monitor.
  2. UEFI firmware that isn't bugged and acts according to the specification, along with supporting ACPI 2.0+.
  3. A PS/2 controller that is emulated/implemented by the system properly, as a USB controller would take forever to program (see the GNU Hurd microkernel).
  4. A CPU that supports x2APIC.

Having a serial port (COM1, preferably) on your hardware would help in debugging, so you can receive messages from the kernel about its progress. You can boot HAVK from BIOS by emulating the UEFI services, but that is not explained in detail here and should be avoided.

Useful development resources

These two links are the best resources for development on the x86-64 architecture:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sdm#combined

https://developer.amd.com/resources/developer-guides-manuals/

The OSDev Wiki helps greatly with general overviews:

https://wiki.osdev.org

I started from here and have progressed beyond it at this stage:

https://wiki.osdev.org/Ada_Bare_bones

These links are helpful for understanding Ada, SPARK, and GNAT:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming

http://docs.adacore.com/live/wave/spark2014/html/spark2014_ug/index.html

http://docs.adacore.com/live/wave/spark2014/html/spark2014_rm/index.html

http://docs.adacore.com/live/wave/gnat_rm/html/gnat_rm/gnat_rm.html

Disclaimer: This is the first program I have made with either Ada or SPARK, and that includes any Hello World examples. A lot of this OS may not be modelled correctly as I am new to the concept of formal verification as well.

There is currently no specification of what the kernel should do, so I'm making it up as I go along. gnatprove is used until it no longer brings up any warnings or unproven checks by being as careful as possible and placing restrictive contracts, with the purpose being to avoid runtime errors, not proving 100% correctness. There's still SPARK mode exclusions and assumptions made, like for when raw memory manipulation is necessary to continue.

License

GNU GPLv3. Applies to everything unless stated otherwise. This repository also contains OVMF compiled firmware, GNU-EFI objects, and Ada runtime files provided by AdaCore as a part of GNAT GPL.