Introduction to Bismuth VM

This is the first post in what will hopefully become a series of posts about a virtual machine I’m developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. This post will touch on some of the design fundamentals and goals, with future posts going into more detail on each.

But to explain how I got here I first have to tell you about Bismuth, the kernel.
↫ Eniko Fox

It’s not every day the a developer of an awesome video game details a project they’re working on that also happens to be excellent material for OSNews. Eniko Fox, one of the developers of the recently released Kitsune Tails, has also been working on an operating system and virtual machine in her spare time, and has recently been detailing the experience in, well, more detail. This one here is the first article in the series, and a few days ago she published the second part about memory safety in the VM.

The first article goes into the origins of the project, as well as the design goals for the virtual machine. It started out as an operating systems development side project, but once it was time to develop things like the MMU and virtual memory mapping, Fox started wondering if programs couldn’t simply run inside a virtual machine atop the kernel instead. This is how the actual Bismuth virtual machine was conceived.

Fox wants the virtual machine to care about memory safety, and that’s what the second article goes into. Since the VM is written in C, which is anything but memory-safe, she’s opting for implementing a form of sandboxing – which also happens to be the point in the development story where my limited knowledge starts to fail me and things get a little too complicated for me. I can’t even internalise how links work in Markdown, after all (square or regular brackets first? Also Markdown sucks as a writing tool but that’s a story for another time).

For those of you more capable than me – so basically most of you – Fox’ series is a great series to follow along as she further develops the Bismuth VM.