Benefits of writing a Linux-like kernel using Golang include:

• Golang is a modern, high-level programming language that is easy to learn and use, which can make the development of a kernel faster and less error-prone.
• Golang is designed to be concurrent and scalable, which can help to make the kernel more efficient and able to handle more tasks at once.
• Golang has a built-in garbage collector, which can help to reduce the risk of memory leaks and other memory-related bugs.

Costs of writing a Linux-like kernel using Golang include:

• Golang is a relatively new language and has not been as extensively tested and used in low-level systems as C, which is the language that Linux is typically written in.
• Golang does not have the same level of low-level control over the system as C, which can make it more difficult to achieve certain performance goals or implement certain features.
• Golang has relatively large memory footprint, which can be an issue for a kernel that needs to run on resource-constrained systems.

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie and a team of computer scientists at Bell Labs designed a new programming language, C. It played a crucial role in the development of the UNIX OS by researchers like Ken Thompson. Since then, C has became the dominant progamming language in operating system design. Almost all mainstream OSes, including Windows, MacOS and Linux, are written in C.

C is popular in system programming because of its flexible low-level memory control mechanism and the delivery of high performance machine code. However, in the last three decades, high-level languages like Java, C# and Go have emerged with a promise of reducing programmers’ burden of memory management by a mechanism called garbage collection.

The popularity of these high-level languages (HLL) make a few researchers at MIT, Cody Cutler, Frans Kaashoek, and Robert Morris, to ponder what exactly are the trade-offs of writing a POSIX-like kernel using them. They conducted an experiment of a monolithic POSIX kernel written completely in Go and Assembly in a paper titled “Biscuit: The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a high-level language” OSDI ‘18

Here are the results. The garbage collection costs up 3% of CPU. The longest single garbage collector pause was 115 microseconds in NGINX server and the longest NGINX client request was delayed was 600 miliseconds. Go performance costs about 10% of CPU and its GC needs a factor of 2-3 of heap headroom to run efficiently. Lastly, they did some stress system call tests with identical source-level code paths and found that C is 5-15% faster than Go versions.

Based on these results, the authors concluded that Go is more suited for exploring new kernel designs, and VMMs, but can’t replace the current C-based Linux kernel. If the goal is to experiment with OS ideas, Go’s HLL features may help; if the goal is avoiding common security pitfalls, Go can help with its safe memory management. If the CPU performance or memory efficiency is critical, then C is more favorable than Go.

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