Dark Bio - Ark Emulator

A desktop app that runs an Ark device locally for development and demo purposes. It boots the real ArkOS firmware inside QEMU and hosts a small native window standing in for the device's physical face (4 RGB LEDs and a reset pin).

Caution

The emulator is not a vault. The backing disk image is an unencrypted qcow2 file on your host filesystem. Anything the emulated Ark stores ends up there, readable by anyone with access to your machine. Do not put real genomic data, real keys, or anything else you want to keep private into the emulator. It exists for development, demos, and integration testing only. The cryptographic and physical-security properties Dark Bio promises apply to the actual Ark hardware, not this emulator. For any workload where data confidentiality matters, use a real Ark.

Prerequisites

All platforms also need a pair of ArkOS emulator firmware artifacts: a kernel image (vmlinuz) and a gzipped initramfs. The launcher takes their paths via --kernel and --initrd.

Linux

• qemu-system-aarch64: Arch: pacman -S qemu-system-aarch64; Debian/Ubuntu: apt install qemu-system-arm.
• qemu-img (used to allocate the disk image): Arch: pacman -S qemu-img; Debian/Ubuntu: apt install qemu-utils.
• webkit2gtk-4.1 + libsoup3: Arch: pacman -S webkit2gtk-4.1; Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libsoup-3.0-dev.

macOS

• qemu-system-aarch64: brew install qemu.
• WKWebView ships with the OS; nothing extra needed.

Windows

• qemu-system-aarch64: install QEMU via its official Windows installer.
• WebView2 runtime: preinstalled on recent Windows 10/11; otherwise downloadable from Microsoft.

Run

cargo run --release -p launcher -- --kernel /path/to/vmlinuz --initrd /path/to/initramfs.gz

The window shows the device face. The reset pin is a real button; the four corner LEDs render whatever the firmware streams from its RGB-LED driver. The backing disk is created automatically on first launch as a dynamically growing qcow2 image: it starts a few hundred KB in size and grows on demand as the guest writes, up to a fixed virtual ceiling. Delete it to reset the emulated device's state.

Press Escape to close the window (Alt+F4 / WM shortcuts also work).

Configuration

flag	default	meaning
--kernel	required	path to the kernel image (vmlinuz)
--initrd	required	path to the initramfs (.gz)
--disk	disk.img	path to the backing disk; auto-allocated on first run
--host-addr	127.0.0.1:18181	host address that SLIRP forwards into the guest's :18181
--memory	8192	guest RAM in MiB; lower it on memory-constrained hosts

Run with --help for the full list.

Layout

path	role
launcher/	Tauri app (Rust). Spawns QEMU, hosts the window.
ui/	Static HTML/CSS/JS. Renders the device + pin, drives the firmware's /v1/hw driver bus.