On 2/13/19, Suman Thakur sumanthakur1976@gmail.com wrote:
I'm very new to seL4. I would like to run seL4 on x86_64 Intel NUC, and I was wondering if there's a "distribution" that I could try. If not, any pointers on how to create a functional seL4 box that can run, say apache, will be really helpful.
seL4 is only a microkernel. You need some kind of OS on top of it for actually running applications. The only working OS environments for seL4 that I'm aware of are CAmkES https://docs.sel4.systems/CAmkES/ and Genode http://genode.org/about/index, and both are "OS frameworks" rather than conventional OSes. CAmkES is only good for static deeply embedded systems and can only run a fixed configuration of processes set at build time. Genode is more like a general-purpose OS and supports dynamic systems. Neither is natively compatible with anything else, although both support running Linux as a guest VM, and Genode also has a Unix compatibility layer (although I think it has a bit of performance overhead compared to running stuff natively). Genode does have a pre-built general-purpose live USB image https://genode.org/download/sculpt although I don't think it is seL4-based (Genode supports multiple microkernels, and seL4 isn't the best supported).
I'm also writing my own sel4-based OS called UX/RT https://gitlab.com/uxrt, which will be a QNX-like conventional general-purpose OS with native Linux compatibility, rather than a framework like CAmkES and Genode. It's currently not even remotely usable though and all it does is print the bootinfo from the kernel to the serial port (I need to finish bringing up basic Rust infrastructure on seL4 before I can start writing any "real" code for UX/RT).