Comment by josephg
4 months ago
Yes. I really hope someone builds a nice, usable OS with SeL4 as a base. If SeL4 is like the linux kernel, we need a userland (GNU). And a distribution that's simple to install and make use of.
I'd love to work on this. It'd be a fun problem!
seL4 needs a ‘the rest of the kernel’ to be like linux
It needs device drivers for modern x86 hardware. And filesystems, and a TCP stack. All of that code can be done in "SeL4 userland", but yeah - I see your point.
Are there any projects like that going on? It feels like an obvious thing.
A lot of deployments essentially virtualize Linux or run portions of NetBSD (e.g. via their "rump" kernel mechanism) to achieve driver support, file systems, etc. That's not really a general-purpose solution, though.
There is work within major consumer product companies building such things (either with sel4, or things based on sel4's ideas), and there's Genode on seL4.
Are you aware of https://genode.org ?