Microsoft's Next OS?

Microsoft during its TechFest held earlier this year showcased a new

operating system kernel concept called 'Singularity'. This isn't going to be a

new version of Windows or DOS, rather it is released to bring forth

possibilities of an operating system that is highly safe and reliable compared

to contemporary OSes. The safe and dependable operating system would mean that

it won't be marred with memory problems like buffer over flow; memory leaks etc.

that result in system crashes. With Singularity, Microsoft has built an OS that

uses .NET framework as a base of its architecture as 95% of the kernel code is

written in C#. Singularity 1.1 Research Development Kit (RDK) was released

earlier this year. Here we will see how Singularity is safe from hackers and how

to deploy this RDK.

How Singularity is safe-OS



The Singularity project has started from ground up rather than being based

on any existing kernel of an OS. The designing of contemporary operating systems

-including Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and UNIX-trace their lineage back

to an operating system called Multics that originated in the mid-1960s. The

researchers at Singularity project didn't follow the decade-long tradition of

designing the operating system but took a whole new approach that reflects

today's computing needs and requirements.

This prototype operating system is primarily different from other operating

systems because its kernel is almost entirely written in Sing# which is an

extension of C#, a modern high-level programming language. This ensures a

dependable computing environment as C# provides Singularity with security

advantages over contemporary operating systems that have been written in

lower-level languages such as C or C++. By the use of C#, the researchers have

been able to prevent a class of errors known as buffer overruns, thus being able

to eliminate an area of vulnerability that was generally exploited by viruses

and worms.

To improve upon dependability factor of Singularity three key architectural

features have been incorporated. The first is a pioneering concept of Software

Isolated Processes (SIP) that helps protect programs and system services. SIPs

enable programs to be broken down into components that are isolated from other

software components running on the same device. Singularity runs each program,

device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share

memory or modify their own code. This enables pieces of a system to fail without

risking a total system failure.

The second architectural feature relates to the fact that a program's many

SIPs need to communicate and share information as they work on shared resources

or on shared objectives. As objectives are shared, there can be situations of

miscommunications happening between the processes. To avoid such

miscommunications that can result in errors and system crashes, the developers

for Singularity project devised a mechanism for communication under which they

defined how the communication should take place between two processes and

through static analysis they checked the codes of the processes at compile time

to ensure any miscommunication of the processes.

To configure the network connection for Loopback Adapter, change it's IP properties with values shown abovel for IP address and Subnet Mask

The third architectural feature is called as 'manifest-based programs'. The

contemporary OSes do not analyze a program's composition or the resource that it

is going to utilize, being presented with a series of bits, the OS simply

executes them. While in case of Singularity, researchers have emphasized upon

system dependability and because of that each program that is to be executed by

Singularity is checked and analyzed for not breaching or breaking the processes

of the OS.

Thus due to some of these architectural design incorporations, Singularity is

safe and as it's based on .NET Framework it will also be safe from hackers and

will not be having memory problems that results in crashes.

Pre-requisites for installation



With this month's PCQ_Professional DVD we are providing the Singularity RDK

1.1 which is also available for download from the Codeplex site. Within the same

Singularity folder in the DVD you'll also find the requisite tools that are

needed to install and run Singularity. The Singularity RDK zip folder contains

the source code and the tools required to build and boot it. The other tools

required are:-

For installing the complete Singularity operating system, the msb command will build the World.proj

• Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Dot NET Framework 1.1

Before starting up with building and booting of Singularity, you will have to

install all these three tools. If you have a higher version of . NET Framework

installed, Singularity requires CLR version 1.1, so Dot NET framework 1.1 is

required. After installing Virtual PC and . NET Framework 1.1; when you install

the Windows Debugging Tools, you'll have to add the path of WinDbg.exe to the

system variables “path”. Now we can proceed with building and booting of

Singularity.

Building Singularity



Unzip the contents of the Singularity-6709.zip to your local drive. Within

the root directory is a script configure.cmd. When this script is executed from

Windows command prompt it creates the shortcut to launch a shell with the

configuration required to build Singularity. Also create a new environment

variable called as “SINGULARITY_ROOT” and to its path add the path of the

location of the root directory where singularity folder was extracted (for eg.

C:\Singularity-6709).

From the boot directory, bootd command will start the DHCP server and open ports on 10.99.99.1 IP address for loading Singularity's build file

Now double-click on the Singularity RDK 1.1 icon on the desktop. This will

initiate a command line window that is ready to receive commands and prepare for

building the Singularity OS. The following command will initiate the build of

complete Singularity OS.

msb /t:Clean Distro\World.proj



With World.proj, the build process takes a long time to complete. On our

system having Pentium-4 2.6 GHz processor and 768 MB RAM, the build process took

about half an hour to complete. If you want to build quickly, use Tiny.proj in

the command line instead of World.proj. Once the build process is completed

successfully, you can find the build ISO file in the %SINGULARITY_ROOT%\Base.obj\Distros

folder.

Now before booting this build file we'll have to configure the Loopback

Network Adapter on the Host operating system.

Configuring Loopback Adapter



As we will be using Microsoft Virtual PC to boot Singularity OS, we will

need Loopback adapter that will allow Virtual PC to connect to the host PC for

booting via network. Through the “Add Remove Hardware” wizard the Microsoft

Loopback Adapter can be installed. After the wizard is complete, a new network

connection for loopback adapter gets created on the host operating system. This

new network connection will be having an auto generated name like Local

Connection 2 and having device name of Microsoft Loopback Adapter. Now open its

properties dialog box, and under the General tab select the Internet Protocol

(TCP/IP) and then click its properties. Now in the Internet Protocol Properties

window, select the option “Use the following IP address” and enter 10.99.99.1 as

value for IP address and 255.255.255.0 as value for the Subnet Mask. Leave

Default Gateway and DNS server as blank and click OK to set the properties.

The Windows debugger shows the trace log of the boot process in the Command paneand the “break” command's code can be seen on the debugger

Booting Singularity



Now when we are having Virtual PC and debugging tools installed, and also

the Loopback adapter has been configured on the host PC we can boot the

Singularity OS on the Virtual PC. To boot Singularity we will first start the

port from which the Singularity build file will be loaded onto the virtual

machine. The following command will do that at the Singularity shell prompt;



cd boot


bootd /dhcp /tftp

Now open a new Singularity 1.1 command prompt and there enter the following

commands.

cd boot



boottest.cmd pxe.vmc

The boottest command loads the ISO image file of the operating system from

the network from the IP address “10.99.99.1”. And just for that purpose only we

started the port on the loopback adapter. The Singularity OS boots up in a new

Virtual PC window.

Now as Singularity does not come with any debugging tools, we had installed

the Windows Debugging Tools separately for that purpose only. To see how we can

start the debugger for Singularity to see how the boot process and all commands

execute, we will have to run the following commands.

cd build



dbg.cmd /pipe

The dbg.cmd command in the build directory sets up the source code, symbols,

and Singularity specific debugger extensions, and then invokes the WinDbg. The

debugger has two parts, one part shows the debug strings which come as trace

logs. The other part shows the code for the command on which you are currently

working. The debugger can be used to navigate through the stack, memory and

current registers etc. to view the source code.

Thus we have built and deployed Singularity OS using a Virtual PC. Now it

would be interesting to see how new possibilities are explored to make this

prototype OS an operating system of the future.