Just a couple quick answers is issues raised.
Improved documentation is desirable for all. There is a few challenges here though as seL4 is closer to being a virtual machine than a traditional OS in the sense that the abstractions are very low level. So documentation could:
a) Focus on seL4 and its abstractions, however this is mostly useful to somebody embarking on building an OS personality running on seL4.
b) Focus in an existing OS personality on seL4, which is most useful to somebody wanting to build an application, assuming the OS personality meets the requirements of the application domain.
Our experience with the advanced OS course (AOS) is that option (a) is a substantial learning curve. Unless you plan on embarking on building an OS personality from the ground up, this would be a challenging place to start (effectively bottom up). The AOS material is online if you want to start from the bottom up.
For option (b), and most mature environment is CAmkES (an environment for static systems). It is actively maintained and in use by project partners and community. I’ll prod the locally to see if material from the http://sel4.systems/Community/Devdays/ can be made readily available.
An immature environment is RefOS, whose goal was/is a simple multiserver POSIX-ish environment on seL4. RefOS is a little too immature to be the poster child for getting started on seL4. We are definitely interested in seeing it progress, but we have limited resources ourselves to invest (unless I get an interested student again, which is always a possibility). Regarding the patches from Hypernewbie, we’re working on them, we expect to get them out RSN (they have non-trivial conflicts with our current release candidate).
Regards
- Kevin
Assoc. Prof. Kevin Elphinstone, Trustworthy Systems
DATA61 | CSIRO
E kevin.elphinstone@nicta.com.au T +61 2 8306 0573
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