The Fiasco microkernel • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fiasco microkernel

#41

Post by nickpsecurity » Sat, Oct 13, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #34

als0 wrote: post #4

There are two notable projects here: L4Re is a (reasonably) portable L4 userspace environment and has a large collection of ported libraries (e.g. zlib etc). Fiasco is the L4 microkernel they have developed for many years. It is different to the others because it is written in C++ and heavily object oriented. It also has concurrency in the kernel unlike simple systems like seL4, although at a complexity cost. As a si…

I think there is a lot of promise in pulling mature components from Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris/Illumos (or whoever does SunOS these days) across that paravirtual barrier, and progressively tailoring them toward the microkernel environment; while testing them using the systems they originate from. Over time, maybe a microkernel could become the basis of most of these former monoliths.

The Dresden and Genode folks do it a bit different: just virtaulize the OS as a user-mode application. Then, some add ability to reuse device drivers across VM's to get the drivers specific OS's (esp Linux) support. From there, you can slowly pull code out as standalone or native applications as you described. There's usually middleware (eg Camkes) that lets the standalone code talk to code inside the VM. I'll give Genode as an example of mixing native and VM code.

https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index

Re: The Fiasco microkernel

#42

Post by nickpsecurity » Sat, Oct 13, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

butterisgood wrote: post #36

atombender wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Mach 3.0 was designed to be a microkernel, macOS doesn't actually use it as one. The entire kernel, called XNU, runs in kernel mode, just like Linux. The macOS kernel had a reputation for sluggishness back in its early days, due (to the best of my understanding) due to the sluggishness of Mach messaging, which is how Mach implements system calls to the kernel. macOS also supports BSD syscalls, and Apple has app…

Darbat seems to be what's running in the Secure Enclave of the iPhone. Or at least something like it. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Mandt-De... Pretty darned awesome. Fiasco is GREAT. You at least used to be able to run it with DROPS which had a cool desktop/demo disk where you could just launch a bunch of Debian Linux instances as L4 tasks. It was like VMWare on crack at the time when I tried i…

DROPS is still available here:

http://demo.tudos.org/eng_about.html

It was one, cool-ass demo. I especially liked firing up VM's lightening-fast given I was reading people say they use containers since VM's are too slow and inefficient. Maybe the people building their favorite VM's just aren't good at efficiency. Build on L4/L4Linux instead. ;)

Re: The Fiasco microkernel

#43

Post by harry8 » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 12:04 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #39

harry8 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not big bucks, it was broke, general dynamics shut it down shortly after. Nobody with options got paid. The claim of a billion phones should be taken with some salt and l4 wasn't being used like a microkernel on the baseband - everything running in protected mode. If okl4 is the benchmark of success, microkernels are a near total failure. OKL4 was an abject failure, he said bitterly.

Oh wait, it looks like I missed his write-ups looking back at the company since I transitioned to a new area. I'll be going through them later. Thanks for the correction! So, I drop claims to L4 mostly a failure so far with other microkernels being successful in niche markets, esp embedded and safety/security-critical. The L4 people at places like Dresden at least gave us lots of good designs that are being put to us…

Definitely treat anything written by Heiser like any other marketing document, identify his interests at the time of writing first. And sure you can say that for almost anyone in this business...