mORMot Open Source

EduardAppelhans

Member

Registered: 2020-04-14

Posts: 8

sel4 OS userspace Support conceivable ?

sel4 is a interesting microkernel OS https://sel4.systems/ whitch might be interesting to support with Objekt Pascal Language and mORMot Framework in future if conceivable https://docs.sel4.systems/SuggestedProjects.html.

What do you think?

ab

Administrator

From: France

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 14,240

Website

Re: sel4 OS userspace Support conceivable ?

The problem with this kind of OS is that the driver support is limited.
FPC support is feasible I guess. FPC cross-platform is very good. But a lot of work.

To be fair, sel4 is a micro-kernel with very little features. For instance it has no network stack: you need to run e.g. Linux or BSD on top of sel4 to have some network...
So in practice, for the mORMot interest - i.e. the SOA server side, a tuned Linux distribution is most of the time more stable and faster than those OSs.

pvn0

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2018-02-12

Posts: 210

Re: sel4 OS userspace Support conceivable ?

I did some research on my own into microkernels and whatnot and it's mostly just a meme at this point. Instead people interested in such things should look at Gentoo Linux distribution instead.

EduardAppelhans

Member

Registered: 2020-04-14

Posts: 8

Re: sel4 OS userspace Support conceivable ?

I came across sel4 because cyber security is becoming more and more important and is already a big problem today and is becoming more so.

Software probably always contains bugs and great software more. This is also true for operating systems, which seem to be very critical for cyber security. Seems to apply to both Windows and Linux, although as open source it is arguably ahead - but doesn't change much of the underlying plight. 

This is where sel4 comes in. It runs over me more and more often with my question which direction the development could take against this background in the future, possibly with the open RISC V development.   

For me personally it is also interesting that at the beginning of my interest in practical IT concepts I encountered the predecessor of sel4 in the early 80's - in Germany at that time a school operating system called EUMEL with the teaching language ELAN with nice features.     

If I understand correctly, sel4 has deliberately no functions or services except for the interprocess communication (IPC) combined with the capability access concept (caps) for all resources. Highest provable security with maximum speed is achieved in such a way (i.e. a speed loss for built-in security under 10%). All other OS services, so also the network stack are not in the kernel but in the user space.

In this respect I can understand that it makes sense to run Linux or BSD on sel4 to have all other necessary OS services available.
Since in my impression mORMot and Object Pascal (FPC) cover a very wide range from the very bottom to the very top consistently and it gets on my nerves that everything innovative goes in the direction of cyber security here in C, Python, Java & Co I thought it worth asking whether something could not be done here with reasonable effort.