Announcing Asterinas 0.18.0

The Asterinas community is happy to announce a new version of Asterinas, 0.18.0!

The headline of this release is a major step toward running Asterinas as the guest OS for VM-based Kata Containers and Confidential Containers (CoCo). Getting there requires a host of new building blocks, and this release delivers many of them: namespaces (the IPC and cgroup namespaces, plus nsfs at /proc/[pid]/ns), cgroups (the PID sub-controller and a partial CPU sub-controller), virtio-fs for sharing a filesystem with the host, virtio-rng (/dev/hwrng) for hardware entropy, and a fully reimplemented vsock for host–guest communication.

Userspace debugging comes to Asterinas in this release. We implement the ptrace syscall along with its core operations—PTRACE_SETOPTIONS, PTRACE_SYSCALL, and PTRACE_PEEK/POKE—which together enable popular debugging tools such as GDB and strace to run on Asterinas, complete with verified-usage documentation and CI coverage.

This release also substantially modernizes the storage stack. The ext2 filesystem has been reimplemented, a new NVMe driver joins the block layer, and the VFS gains a new Dentry revalidate mechanism alongside a refactored page cache. The result is a more reliable and capable storage stack.

Finally, Asterinas NixOS dramatically expands its coverage of real-world software, with over 100 popular packages now verified—including Codex, QEMU, and Firefox. To keep this growing catalog working, we have integrated a range of new test suites, including kselftest, xfstests, and the standard unit-test suites of Go, Python, and JDK.

Asterinas NixOS

We have made the following key changes to Asterinas NixOS:

Asterinas Kernel

We have made the following key changes to the Asterinas kernel:

Process management
- Refactor PidFile and add the pidfd_getfd syscall, add the pidfd_send_signal syscall, and align PidFile semantics with POSIX
- Fix buggy behavior when loading corrupted ELF files
Ptrace
- Add the ptrace syscall
- Support debugging with ptrace
- Add PTRACE_SETOPTIONS, PTRACE_SYSCALL, and PTRACE_PEEK/POKE_TEXT/DATA
- Add (kernel-side) patches, verified-usage docs, and CI for GDB and strace
- Support force-write via /proc/[pid]/mem
- Add the Yama ptrace scope
Signals and IPC
- Correct sigsuspend and fix various other signal behaviors
- Fix lots of bugs in System V semaphores
Memory management
- Respect mmap address hints
- Fix many wrong error codes and other buggy behavior in various MM syscalls
File systems
Sockets and networking
Namespaces and cgroups
- Support nsfs (/proc/[pid]/ns)
- Support the IPC namespace
- Support the cgroup namespace
- Implement the cgroup PID sub-controller
- Add a partial cgroup CPU sub-controller, providing cpu.stat statistics and dummy cpu.weight/cpu.max limit files
- Bind mount namespace files
Security
Devices
Tests
- Add Linux kselftest test suite
- Add the xfstests test suite
Misc
- Add a generic syscall table
- Introduce the kernel parameter framework

Asterinas OSTD & OSDK

We have made the following key changes to OSTD and/or OSDK:

Asterinas Book

We have made the following key changes to the Book:

Contributors

This release was made possible by contributions from 36 individuals. Thank you for your amazing work!

Ruihan Li (191 commits)
jiangjianfeng (92 commits)
Wang Siyuan (72 commits)
Qingsong Chen (64 commits)
Chen Chengjun (59 commits)
Tate, Hongliang Tian (52 commits)
Tao Su (46 commits)
Zhang Junyang (36 commits)
zjp (26 commits)
li041 (23 commits)
Xinyi Yu (23 commits)
Marsman1996 (18 commits)
wyt8 (17 commits)
Aaron Chen (9 commits)
zzj-5341 (9 commits)
Chaoqun Zheng (8 commits)
Hsy-Intel (7 commits)
Cautreoxit (4 commits)
Chao Liu (4 commits)
Junrui Luo (4 commits)
Ray Lee (4 commits)
rikosellic (4 commits)
TankTechnology (4 commits)
Zhenchen Wang (4 commits)
Yuke Peng (3 commits)
Zhihang Shao (3 commits)
yyda (3 commits)
Arthur Paulino (1 commit)
Jakob Hellermann (1 commit)
Linermao (1 commit)
lxh (1 commit)
Shen Bowen (1 commit)
Wei Zhang (1 commit)
wrj97 (1 commit)
YanLien (1 commit)
zzjrabbit (1 commit)