December 2025 - Devel - lists.sel4.systems

Announcing release v0.3 of Neptune OS, a Windows NT personality for seL4
by Dr. Chang Liu, PhD. 30 Dec '25

30 Dec '25

Dear List, I am announcing the v0.3 release [1] of Neptune OS, a Windows NT personality built on top of the seL4 microkernel. Neptune OS implements the upper layer of the Windows kernel (the "NT Executive") as a user space process under seL4, providing NT-like interfaces via standard seL4 IPC primitives to device drivers and user programs. These then allow Windows device drivers to be ported to run as user space processes under Neptune OS, with potentially greater degree of isolation and fault recovery than can be achieved under a traditional macro-kernel or hybrid-kernel design. The highlights of the v0.3 release are a bunch of computing industry acronyms: UEFI, ACPI, PCI(E), AHCI, and NVME. We have improved upon the basic NT PnP manager implementation we had in the previous release and ported over the ACPI and PCI(E) drivers from ReactOS, to enable completely dynamic discovery/enumeration, resource assignment, lifetime cycle, and power management of hardware devices. The hope is that this will eventually make Neptune OS suitable as a general purpose OS that must manage an ever-changing device landscape, while still being able to leverage seL4's strong isolation and formal guarantees. Built upon this work, we have ported over what I hope is a reasonably complete portion of the Windows storage device driver stack, consisting of the class drivers (classpnp.sys, disk.sys), the storage port driver (storport.sys), two storage miniport drivers (for AHCI and NVME), and the partition manager (partmgr.sys) and mount-point manager (mountmgr.sys). Among these, the class drivers as well as the AHCI miniport driver are from the official Microsoft sample drivers [3], the NVME miniport driver is from Open Systems Alliance [4], and storport, partmgr, and mountmgr are from ReactOS. These drivers total an over-120K codebase and with the exception of storport where some missing pieces had to be added due to the incompleteness of the ReactOS implementation, are largely unmodified. I hope the non-triviality of these drivers serves as a convincing demonstration that our design is capable of reusing complex, real-world Windows drivers in a microkernel-based OS (which NT had originally hoped to be, allegedly). I have recorded a short video [2] showing the ACPI and AHCI driver stack in action, including device tree enumeration, power management (reboot/poweroff), and basic shell commands. This release also includes a basic disk IO benchmarking tool. Based on some early testing we seem to be able to saturate the AHCI bandwidth without a problem, but NVME seems to be underperforming. This will be part of the work going into the next release. Additionally, due to the lack of high quality open-source Windows drivers, a big part of the next release will be focused on designing and building a subsystem which allows Linux drivers to run natively (without emulation) as userspace processes on Neptune OS, so stay tuned! [1] https://github.com/cl91/NeptuneOS/releases/tag/v0.3.0003 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejNeS7A5qq0 [3] https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/main/storage [4] https://github.com/JoeHsu092015/Windows-NVMe-driver --- Dr. Chang Liu, PhD. github.com/cl91/NeptuneOS

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seL4 developer hangout reminder
by Birgit Brecknell 07 Dec '25

07 Dec '25

Hi all A friendly reminder that the seL4 developer hangout is on again this week. Wed 10 Dec, 7:00 UTC For your local date and time please see https://sel4.systems/stay-informed.html#calendar Zoom link: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/82640784431 Birgit Brecknell seL4 Foundation Project Coordinator Sydney, Australia Mon 9-5 Wed 2-5 Fri 9-5 birgit(a)sel4.systems <mailto:birgit@sel4.systems> bbrcknl(a)gmail.com <mailto:bbrcknl@gmail.com>

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next seL4 TSC meeting Dec 3 (Dec 2 in US)
by Gerwin Klein 02 Dec '25

02 Dec '25

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) of the seL4 Foundation will hold its next public meting on: - Sydney: Wed, 3 Dec, 6pm - Central Europe: Wed, 3 Dec, 8am - US West Coast (LA/SF): Tue, 2 Dec, 11pm See also the seL4 calendar feed available from here: https://sel4.systems/stay-informed.html The meeting is by Zoom, and you can join from here: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/89019527332 Anyone interested can join the meeting and listen to the discussion and request to speak, which will be granted if time permits. Only TSC members can vote. The seL4 code of conduct applies to the meeting [1]. The agenda for the meeting so far is: - action items from last meeting - adopting TSC charter for the new seL4 Foundation organisation - discuss/vote on open RFCs: https://github.com/seL4/rfcs/pulls We are not likely to get through all of the RFCs in this meeting. If you have an RFC open and want to facilitate it moving forward, please leave a comment that summarises the discussion so far so we can pick up there in the meeting. If there are other items that I missed or you think should be on the agenda, please let me know. If we can't get to an item this time, we can still schedule another meeting. Cheers, Gerwin (TSC chair) [1]: https://sel4.systems/Contribute/conduct.html This email and any files transmitted with it may contain confidential information. If you believe you have received this email or any of its contents in error, please notify me immediately by return email and destroy this email. Do not use, disseminate, forward, print or copy any contents of an email received in error.

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