TamaGo – bare metal Go for ARM SoCs

https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/tamago

by dgellow • 6 years ago

184 28 6 years ago

reustle• 6 years ago

The TamaGo logo is the Golang Gopher in an egg. Tamago (卵) means egg in Japanese. I'm guessing this was intentional :)

davidhyde2• 6 years ago

Yup, probably a reference to the Tamagotchi. For the younger readers out there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi

duskwuff• 6 years ago

No, that's a separate coinage. "Tamagotchi" is a portmanteau of "tamago" (egg) and "uotchi" (watch).

Kiro• 6 years ago

Now I feel old for thinking Tamagotchi was common knowledge.

pezezin• 6 years ago

Random trivia: "tamago" can also be written as 玉子, which means something like "round child". 卵 is used for any kind of egg, 玉子 mostly for cooked chicken eggs.

dgellow• 6 years ago

This blog article from February of this year gives some context: https://labs.f-secure.com/blog/tamago/

TamaGo reduces the attack surface of embedded systems firmware by removing any run time dependency on C code and inherently complex Operating Systems.
It does so with minimal changes to the Go run time and a set of packages to provide drivers for supported boards.

varispeed2• 6 years ago

Ok so it removes the C surface of attack, but does it not introduce the Go one? What makes it superior when it comes to security?

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

For starters:

- Bounds checking for strings and arrays

- Proper strings

- No implicit type conversions

- Unsafe code requires use of unsafe package, thus very easy to track down in code reviews

- No need for pointer arithmetic everywhere, using fat pointers instead (slices)

- For "generic" code interface{} is type safe, whereas void* can be anything

- No use-after-free thanks GC

perbu2• 6 years ago

Last year I discovered TinyGo (tinygo.org). Looking at the list of supported hardware I see quite a few ARM SoCs there. I also believe Google supports the TinyGo project in some shape or form.

So why does TamaGo exists? (No snark, just curious)

ejolto• 6 years ago

I quickly looked up TinyGo and it seems to have a larger scope than TamaGo. For example it supports several Atmel microcontrollers that are not ARM based. TamaGos scope is smaller as they only support ARM.

I'm sure there are more differences.

Edit: They answer the question in their faq https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/tamago/wiki/Frequently-A...

perbu2• 6 years ago

Thanks.

So, for other who are curious. TamaGo is focused on certain ARM SoCs. So CPUs rather than microcontrollers. TamaGo is more or less a fully fledged go running on bare metal.

Pretty cool, actually.

justinclift• 6 years ago

TinyGo is a re-implementation (in progress) of Go (mostly from the ground up), and using LLVM as the backend for code generation.

TamaGo appears to be standard Go, forked to add support for specific boards.

perryizgr8• 6 years ago

Can someone ELI5 the meaning of "bare metal" in this context?

jeffrallen• 6 years ago

TamaGo takes the place of the operating system and it's drivers, so it is between the use application and the hardware.

jvermillard• 6 years ago

A good intro to tamago: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10597-tamago_-_bare_metal_go_fra...

dastx• 6 years ago

Could this potentially be used to compile something like k8s (obv with a custom container engine) so that you could run k8s right on a SoC and no OS getting in your way?

dijit• 6 years ago

Does anyone know if there’s potential support for newer Pi’s?

ireflect• 6 years ago

This is cool as heck. Are there any examples of real use cases that are feasible at TamaGo's current stage of development?

lcarsip3• 6 years ago

Example #1: https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/GoKey

Example #2: https://twitter.com/AndreaBarisani/status/130368998099743949...

(which runs, on the USB armory Mk II, a modified version of https://github.com/f-secure-foundry/armory-ums)

jiveturkey• 6 years ago

Well, you might be surprised to know that there is not a single line of C involved in serving this connection as well as the underlying terminal and functionality.

I was quite dubious of this. Surely the Go runtime is written in C? Turns out that no, Go is self-hosting. The runtime for Go is written in Go. So if you remove the OS, which they did, you have reinvented the wheel! A rounder wheel, this time, to be sure.

The previous wheels I'm referring to are Pascal, Java, Lisp, Forth, Prolog machines. This wheel is a different shape because those others are dedicated, purpose-built hardware, that can only execute those languages.

I wonder can the same (as Tamago, not Pascal et al.) be done for Rust?

https://randoc.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/western-digital-pasc...

aronpye• 6 years ago

I don’t really see the application for bare metal Go. If you’re creating a bare metal application you’re most likely doing it in order to achieve real time computation, something which a garbage collected language can’t offer.

lcarsip3• 6 years ago

Real-time has very little to do with the motivation behind this project or writing on bare metal.

We are writing on bare metal to get rid of hundreds of dependencies and millions of lines of unnecessary code to run single-purpose firmware applications.

As an example, if you want to write a cryptocurrency wallet using Go crypto and web libraries, wouldn't it better to do so without the burden of an entire Linux kernel, its userspace and a complex bootloader?

Please check this presentation for more background on motivations behind this project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QircrJjEtQ

TamaGo – bare metal Go for ARM SoCs

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