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Background

Stefan Lankes edited this page Jun 23, 2024 · 3 revisions

HermitOS is a rewrite of HermitCore in Rust developed at RWTH-Aachen. HermitCore was a research unikernel written in C (libhermit).

The ownership model of Rust guarantees memory/thread-safety and enables us to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. Consequently, the use of Rust for kernel development promises less vulnerabilities in comparison to common programming languages.

The kernel and the integration into the Rust runtime are entirely written in Rust and do not use any C/C++ Code. We extended the Rust toolchain so that the build process is similar to Rust's usual workflow. Rust applications that use the Rust runtime and do not directly use OS services are able to run on RustyHermit without modifications.