RSoC: virtio drivers - 1

By Andy-Python-Programmer on Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Introduction

Hello everyone, I am Anhad Singh and I am working on virtio drivers for Redox OS as part of RSoC 2023 :^)

What is VirtIO?

Briefly, VirtIO is a standardized interface which allows the guest operating system to accesses simplified virtual devices such as block storage, networking adaptors and graphic cards. The VirtIO devices are minimal since they are implemented with the bare necessities to be able to send and recieve data.

Why VirtIO?

Full virtualization allows to run any operating system virtualized. However, the hypervisor is required to emulate physical devices like graphic cards. This leads to slow performance due to the complexity and inefficiency in the emulation process.

Since Redox’s primary development happens by testing and running it in virtual machine, it makes sense to efficiently make use of the virtual environment that it is being run in; getting the most out of the development time.

What I have accomplished so far and whats next?

So far into RSoC, I was able to get the virtio-blk and virtio-net drivers fully working. I continue to work on those drivers and get them upstreamed by this week. Next week I will start working on virtio-gpu to get a taste of GPU acceleration on Redox 🙃🚀

See you next week!