Comment by lproven
3 months ago
> What is the purpose of this OS ?
What is the purpose of any OS?
As all the modern ones slowly converge on similar attributes of being incomprehensibly vast codebases unreadable by any human, typically implemented in C or something closely related to it, using a similar underlying register-machine model, there is value in simply being small, simple, readable, able to do useful work, and being different. If something is also provably correct that's just the icing on the cake.
The primary focus of Lions/seL4 is security, and formal verification of it. It's a necessary project for a world where CVEs are frequently published for the Kernel and other underlying system services, in part because they're still using a 1970s OS design which didn't have internet-connected computers in mind.
The seL4 kernel uses an Object-Capability system (ironically which have also been around since the '70s) in place of Access Control Lists used in POSIX systems. The idea behind capabilities is "don't separate designation from authority" - the capability is both a designator of a resource and the authority to use it - there are no separate ACLs. Separation of designation from authority leads to confused deputies - where one process with lower privileges can trick a higher-privileged process to use the higher privileges on its behalf, which very often leads to privilege escalation vulnerabilities (ie, RCE as root).
Each process has a "cspace" (Capability Space), which holds the capabilities the process may use. When the process performs a system call, it references a capability slot from a set of tables in its own cspace where the capability is held, and the Kernel verifies that the capability is valid in order to perform the syscall. The capabilities can be revoked at any time, and importantly, they cannot be forged - only delegated.
Additionally, seL4 is a microkernel design which is intended to have a small attack surface. It provides only a small number of system calls like `Send`, `Recv`, `Yield`, and combinations of, such as `Call`, `Reply`, `ReplyRecv`. It's a generic interface where an IPC buffer is passed along with a set of delegated capabilities, but there's no specific calls such as `SYS_write` or `SYS_mmap` - these are built on top of the `Send`/`Recv` syscalls and their services are provided by other user-space daemon processes.
One of the best developments of seL4 is the "Mixed-criticality system" support, which provides capabilities for processing time - to enable some processes to have real-time support without becoming CPU hogs.
seL4 can also be seen as a hypervisor which can virtualize other kernels, and part of the Lions effort is to be able to utilize Linux drivers using isolated Linux guests.
To learn more, the seL4 manual is a good place to start: https://sel4.systems/Info/Docs/seL4-manual-latest.pdf. There's some videos on Youtube by Gernot Heiser discussing the MCS support.