A principled approach to operating system construction in Haskell

Hallgren, Thomas; Jones, Mark P.; Leslie, Rebekah; Tolmach, Andrew

doi:10.1145/1086365.1086380

Cited by 44 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…It is not about implementing an operating system in a (purely) functional language. Hallgren et al (2005) did the latter in Haskell in their operating system House, and a number of systems have been implemented in impure functional languages.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

Dolstra¹,

Löh²,

Pierron³

2010

J. Funct. Prog.

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Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as package upgrades or changes to system configuration files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the system. This leads to many problems, such as the inability to roll back changes easily, to deploy multiple versions of a package side-by-side, to reproduce a configuration deterministically on another machine, or to reliably upgrade a system. In this paper we show that we can overcome these problems by moving to a purely functional system configuration model. This means that all static parts of a system (such as software packages, configuration files and system startup scripts) are built by pure functions and are immutable, stored in a way analogous to a heap in a purely functional language. We have implemented this model in NixOS, a non-trivial Linux distribution that uses the Nix package manager to build the entire system configuration from a modular, purely functional specification.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

Dolstra¹,

Löh²,

Pierron³

2010

J. Funct. Prog.

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“…Another very intriguing one is a compositional (or "virtualizable") concurrency interface [19], in which a scheduler may run a thread that itself is a scheduler... and so on. Another example might be a scheduler for a Haskell-based OS [10] or virtual machine (e.g. HALVM) that needs to give preferential treatment to threads handling urgent interrupts.…”

Section: Setting the Scenementioning

confidence: 99%

Lightweight concurrency primitives for GHC

Marlow

Jones

Tolmach

2007

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Haskell Workshop

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The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) has quite sophisticated support for concurrency in its runtime system, which is written in lowlevel C code. As GHC evolves, the runtime system becomes increasingly complex, error-prone, difficult to maintain and difficult to add new concurrency features.This paper presents an alternative approach to implement concurrency in GHC. Rather than hard-wiring all kinds of concurrency features, the runtime system is a thin substrate providing only a small set of concurrency primitives, and the remaining concurrency features are implemented in software libraries written in Haskell. This design improves the safety of concurrency support; it also provides more customizability of concurrency features, which can be developed as Haskell library packages and deployed modularly.

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“…However, it is still rare to find convincing uses of functional programming in building operating systems. In a recent study, it is demonstrated that Haskell (Peyton Jones et al 1999) can be used to implement an experimental OS called House (Hallgren et al 2005). There are also various attempts to apply language-based techniques for enhancing the reliability of the operating systems.…”

Section: Related Work and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing reliable Linux device drivers in ATS

Shi

2007

Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Programming Languages Meets Program Verification

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Contemporary software systems often provide mechanisms for extending functionalities, which imposes great safety concerns on the well-being of critical infrastructures. ATS is a recently developed language with its type system rooted in Applied Type System framework (Xi 2004) which combines linear and dependent type theories for enforcing safe use of resources at low-level. In this paper, we describe a framework for constructing reliable Linux device drivers in ATS. Specifically, drivers are written and type checked in ATS, then compiled and linked to kernel with safety guarantee. Our preliminary experience shows that this approach can effectively enhance the reliability of device drivers and save the testing/debugging time.

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A principled approach to operating system construction in Haskell

Cited by 44 publications

References 10 publications

NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

Lightweight concurrency primitives for GHC

Implementing reliable Linux device drivers in ATS

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