Re: [seL4] FYI: microkernel.info community site

Hi Christian, we did of course do a lot of digging in that direction, there is at least a 30-year history of attempted OS verification, and quite a few success stories (PSOS, KSOS, EROS, KIT etc). Specifically, the claim for seL4 is machine-checked code-level verification. As far as we are aware, only [1] has done something comparable before seL4, and it is very much a demo toy system only, orders of magnitude smaller. Everything else we’re aware of is not machine-checked verification (i.e. pen-and-paper) or is model-level verification, where not the code is verified, but a manually constructed model of what the code does. Cheers, Gerwin

On 11 Mar 2016, at 11:33, Christian Stroetmann wrote:

On the 10th of March 2016 at 23:21, Wolfgang Keller wrote

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Interesting statement on the Muen kernel section: "The world’s first Open Source microkernel that has been formally proven to contain no runtime errors at the source code level. “

We proved full functional correctness (which is a superset of absence of runtime errors) for seL4 in 2009. I must be missing something. I believe how it is meant is the following: "The first kernel to both reach being open source and being proven to contain no runtime errors is Muen." (of course among the kernels that are *now* open source, seL4 is the first one for which the absence of runtime errors was proven)

Wolfgang

Indeed, I also found this statement a little confusing at first.

But nevertheless, I am still very critical with this claim by NICTA as well, because I am virtually for 100% sure, that on the one hand the NASA verified an RTOS for a spacecraft, the USArmy (DARPA, AFRL, etc.) verified an RTOS for a cruise missile or another critical equipement, and one of the largest aircraft manufacturers (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Tupolev, or Mikoyan-Gurevich) verified some kind of a small operating system. On the other hand there were always attempts to do such a work, as it could be seen for example with [1], and it is hardly not convincing that in the following 22 years nobody else tried and eventually achieved it.

In the case of the NASA and the USArmy I am still waiting for a disclosure of historical informations, which in the case of the army most potentially is still confidential.

What makes a judgement even more difficult or even impossible is the problem to draw the exact limits in relation with what is understood as a microkernel, a general purpose operating system kernel and so on for being able to make such a statement "The first verified ... system" at all.

Regards Christian Stroetmann

[1] William R. Bevier: "A Verified Operating System Kernel", Technical Report 11, October, 1987

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On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:33 PM, Gernot Heiser wrote:

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Interesting statement on the Muen kernel section: "The world’s first Open Source microkernel that has been formally proven to contain no runtime errors at the source code level. “

We proved full functional correctness (which is a superset of absence of runtime errors) for seL4 in 2009. I must be missing something.

Gernot

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On 11 Mar 2016, at 6:50 , Jakub Jermář wrote:

Hello,

just FYI, I have set up a simple web page[1] to promote the wider microkernel community and its goals. So far, the page comes with a brief description of the microkernel concept and an incomplete list of microkernel projects with links to each project's web. The description is made out of the first two sentences I found in the "What is XYZ" section or elsewhere on the web of the respective project. I also took the freedom to use the respective project's logo (or what I believed was the project's logo) for promoting it.

I hope you will find this small web a good idea. It was inspired by a similar (though a little bit more informative) site set up by the unikernel community [2]. The sources of the [1] web are hosted on Github [3], so feel free to submit issues or PR to make the site better.

Please send me a PM if there are any issues pertaining your project's cartouche that cannot be dealt with using Github.

Thanks, Jakub

[1] http://microkernel.info [2] http://unikernel.org/projects/ [3] https://github.com/jermar/microkernel.info

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