Hi,
Thank you for all your efforts and time. I believe the user community is the main success key for all open source projects. Many users and researchers, do not have enough time to read, download and evaluate all the source code in order to investigate a system to see if it is suitable for their research or usage. Usually they will go for clean systems which are easy to use, simple to understand, well documented and have a strong community beside the commercial support to ask and get help in case they had a problem.
Here are some comments which may help to increase the number of users and developers for seL4:
A) I suggest to add some howtos to the website. It's better to be a wiki like system so other individuals, researchers and students can help in writing some titles.
Some interesting topics (at least for me as a beginner in micro-kernel) could be:
1- Running Linux/Android on top of seL4.
2- Writing a simple user application with a use case (not just the SOC).
3. Examples on real-time application.
4- Writing a service (could be a device driver, file-system, etc) for seL4.
5- Documents on using possible run-times like Genode.
6- Documents or case studies on porting an opensource software from Linux or POSIX based system to directly run om seL4.
B) Providing ready to use download binary images for supported platforms can also accelerate growth of community.
C) A research areas page which can suggest researchers some ideas to chose a title and do their research to expand seL4 could also be useful. Ideas like rump-kernels, lib-OS, visualization (x86/ARM), etc seems to be possible research titles on seL4. I have seen the
https://sel4.systems/GettingStarted/ page and I think other than CAmkES, ports and Qubes there could be many more titles.
D) I know the major development platform of seL4 has been the Arm architecture, but optimizing the code to utilize the x86 architecture including virtualization can also bring a lot of attention to this project to use seL4 as a replacement for Linux-KVM and Xen in the cloud, IoT or real time systems when stability and security is a matter.
I'm an OS researcher and a senior system engineer (mostly Linux) with a limited time, but I can help in some parts if you think it may be useful.
Thank you again!
Best Regards,
Mehdi