The Benefits and Costs of Writing a POSIX Kernel in a High-Level Language

Biscuit is a POSIX-subset operating system kernel for x86_64 CPUs, which we wrote from scratch over the last four years. Biscuit is a bit more than a research toy. It can run Nginx and Redis with good performance and has some important operating system features, like multicore support, kernel-supported threads, a journaled file system, virtual memory, a TCP/IP stack, and device drivers for AHCI SATA disks and Intel 10 Gb network cards. Building Biscuit was a lot of fun and a lot of work.