In Russia, created a unique operating system "Phantom"

«Phantom"- an operating system that can become a competitor to Linux for Russian government agencies - taking into account the policy of import substitution and the priority of domestic software. Since 2010, Dmitry Zavalishin's DZ Systems company has been developing it, later specialists from Innopolis University joined it. About it writes Cnews.

The main version of the OS is already ready to launch pilot projects. It includes two layers of code: the first one interacts with the processor, memory controller, device drivers and other hardware-oriented components, the second implements the main essence of the OS. The Phantom code is distributed under the terms of the LGPL open license.

How the Phantom OS works

"Phantom" uses microkernels and at the application level contains a virtual bytecode machine in persistent RAM. According to the developers, such a system, in general, does not require files to store data, which means that it will be extremely difficult for malware to change the behavior of applications and organize data leakage. And programmers do not need to manually manage memory and take care of the safety of information.

"Phantom" should also provide high performance. The global address space is used here and there is no context switching between the kernel and applications, which is customary for popular OSes, so the delays in operation are minimal.

In fact, such a system always works. Even if the computer is turned off, she will perceive it only as a pause, and after turning on the applications, they will continue almost from the same place where they left off.

Such a model can be compared to a virtual machine that regularly takes snapshots of its state (the contents of virtual memory) and stores them in permanent memory. This is similar to hibernation in Windows and allows you to very quickly return to the right moment of work if necessary - for example, if something goes wrong.

Bytecode of the virtual machine "Phantom" recalls Java Virtual Machine (JVM) bytecode, with the only difference being that in the Russian system there are no differences between built-in and user-defined data types (classes). Potentially, this will make it easy to port Java applications to a domestic OS.

The OS also has initial support for the POSIX standard. This will make it easier to port applications from Linux and other compatible systems.

In addition, Phantom allows you to execute low-level code in a separate thread. This is useful when performing complex calculations, processing video and sound.

In general, the concept of "Phantom" is not new. In 1991-2005, Johns Hopkins University in the USA was engaged in the creation of the EROS OS (Extremely Reliable Operating System), which was based on the principle of persistence. She took snapshots of her state, checked the consistency of the data, and did not allow changing the state of the kernel. And the fully managed code was implemented in the Singularity project by specialists from the Microsoft research division. But both concepts were used simultaneously in the OS for the first time.

What's next

By the end of the year, the developers plan to present a working prototype ported to a framework for creating microkernel systems. Genode. It is an open source system that can run Linux applications.

Porting will be handled by Innopolis specialists. They will replace the first layer of code with analogues for Genode, will splice the application execution environment with the software core of the framework supporting various architectures, for example, x86, ARM, RISC-V. As a result, the system should become more reliable, safer and more versatile.

In addition, Phantom is integrated with pure sel4 microkernel. This is the only kernel whose code has been mathematically proven to be error-free, said OS creator Dmitry Zavalishin.

But you should not wait for the Phantom to appear on home laptops. The system is aimed at enterprises with special security requirements: defense industry, banks, heat and power complex.

At the same time, Zavalishin admitted that several employees of DZ Systems and two specialists from Innopolis are now developing Phantom, who are attracting groups of students to work. So one can hardly expect rapid progress in the development of the OS itself and the creation of application programs for it.

Ksenia Shestakova