December 2012 - microkernel-devroom

[Microkernel-devroom] FOSDEM 2013 - Final Schedule
by Stefan Kalkowski 02 Jan '13

02 Jan '13

Dear devroom participants, sorry for the delay regarding the final schedule announcement. It was really hard to find a solution with respect to the numerous, interesting submissions. I'd like to thank all people for their proposals. After trying hard to arrange a balanced schedule, here is the outcome: 11:00-11:15 Welcome 11:20-12:00 The GNU/Hurd architecture, nifty features, and latest news 12:05-12:35 Every cloud has a silver lining and what we can learn from it 12:40-13:10 Rathaxes - A DSL for device driver development --- break --- 14:00-14:40 OS Hot Topics 14:45-15:25 Reaching puberty - How Genode is becoming a general-purpose OS 15:30-16:00 Microkernels and You - long path of the small project 16:05-16:40 HelenOS: last year at a glance 16:45-17:25 The NOVA Microhypervisor Interface 17:30-18:10 Romain: OS Support for Replicating Binary Applications 18:15-19:00 Panel discussion Regarding the discussion that took place, whether we should have a demo slot, panel discussion, or some kind of collective taxonomy development: Due to the short time that is left beside the talks, I've chosen Martin's proposal of having a moderated, short panel discussion with all project's on location. Nevertheless, to enable a demo session, and have more time for open discussion, I'll ask the FOSDEM team for some small room on Sunday not necessarily mentioned in the official booklet. Although, chances are low due to limited room capacities. Looking forward to see you in Brussels & happy new year! -- Stefan Kalkowski Genode Labs http://www.genode-labs.com/ · http://genode.org/

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[Microkernel-devroom] [TALK-PROPOSAL] The GNU/Hurd
by Samuel Thibault 16 Dec '12

16 Dec '12

Hello, Here is a talk proposal for the microkernel devroom: Title: The GNU/Hurd architecture, nifty features, and latest news Full name: Samuel Thibault Duration: 45min Short abstract: GNU/Hurd aims at being a general-purpose Operating System with a strong emphasis on flexibility and freedom for the user, and thus based on a design made of a micro-kernel surrounded by a hird of userland servers. It has however a long-term vaporware reputation; development has indeed been relatively dormant for some time, but recent regain of interest has brought interesting improvements and stabilization, to the point that there will be a non-official release of the GNU/Hurd variant of Debian Wheezy, with about 75% of the Debian packages, including classical graphical desktop application (gnome, gnumeric, firefox, ...) This talk will present to GNU/Hurd in general and its "translator" mechanism which replaces the traditional notion of filesystem by userland processes, so as to provide strong flexibility to users and administrators, and we will demo it live. The subhurd/neighborhurd mechanism, a very natural way to provide virtualization container support on GNU/Hurd, will also be presented. We will also present recent developments, notably in terms of DDE device drivers run as userland processes, and discuss about maintenance of DDE. Cheers, Samuel

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[Microkernel-devroom] Talk proposal: Multiserver challenge: Living in a city full of walls
by Jiri Svoboda 15 Dec '12

15 Dec '12

Hi, here is my talk proposal: * title of your talk (will be printed in the FOSDEM booklet) Multiserver challenge: Living in a city full of walls * your full name (will be printed in the FOSDEM booklet) Jiří Svoboda * a short abstract Designing a multiserver OS presents some unique challenges as compared to monolithic design (or it makes existing challenges more relevant.) We will give an overview of some problems which we encountered or expect to encounter during HelenOS development, which should be nevertheless relevant to any multiserver design. These include: - performance and parallelism bottlenecks - IPC-related problems - flow control, error and abort handling - memory arbitration - accounting (who is using my CPU/memory?) - debugging (connect the dots) This is not intended to go into any deep discussion, just to give the listener an idea what the pitfalls of multiserver design are. * duration of your talk (please, no longer than 45 minutes) 15-20min

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[Microkernel-devroom] [Talk proposal] HelenOS: last year at a glance
by Vojtech Horky 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Hello all, here is my proposal: * title of your talk (will be printed in the FOSDEM booklet) HelenOS: last year at a glance * your full name (will be printed in the FOSDEM booklet) Vojtěch Horký * a short abstract HelenOS is a microkernel OS running on several architectures where its vital parts (kernel, system services, drivers) are written from scratch. In the year 2012, a lot of events and changes happened around HelenOS, new major release being the highlight of them. The talk will briefly introduce HelenOS but the focus will be on presenting the achievements of the last 12 months. Among them are new graphical user interface or support for new architectures and devices. But the talk will also touch topics that are not strictly "technical" - our experience with attracting new developers or cooperation with other projects. * duration of your talk (please, no longer than 45 minutes) 30-35min Regards, - Vojta

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[Microkernel-devroom] [TALK-PROPOSAL] The NOVA Microhypervisor Interface
by Udo Steinberg 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Hi all, I'm proposing to give the following talk at FOSDEM's microkernel devroom: Title: The NOVA Microhypervisor Interface Name: Udo Steinberg Duration: 45min (incl. discussion) Abstract: The NOVA microhypervisor combines microkernel and hypervisor functionality and provides an extremely small trusted computing base for user applications and virtual machines running on top of it. The microhypervisor implements a capability-based authorization model and provides basic mechanisms for virtualization, spatial and temporal separation, scheduling, communication, and management of platform resources. The talk will focus on the hypervisor interface and how it can be used by a multi-server environment to manage platform resources, virtual machines, and user applications. After introducing the capability concept and the basic communication mechanisms, more advanced topics such as IOMMU support and real-time scheduling will be discussed. Cheers, Udo

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[Microkernel-devroom] [TALK-PROPOSAL] Graphics Stack for HelenOS
by Petr Koupý 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

Hello, here is the proposal of my talk. I am not entirely convinced that it fits the microkernel devroom topic list, but let's give it a try. [Title] Graphics Stack for HelenOS [Full Name] Petr Koupý [Short Bio] Petr is a computer science student with interest in operating systems and parallelization. He is more or less involved with several open-source projects, namely Molpher, gerbil.sf.net and HelenOS. For HelenOS, he ported GNU binutils during GSOC'11 and implemented graphics stack to serve as a topic of his diploma thesis. [Abstract] HelenOS was recently equipped with a brand new graphics stack consisting only from in-house developed components among which you can find compositor, drawing library and widget toolkit. While limited in implementation scale, stack components contain enough functionality for live demos and to be practically usable by HelenOS developer community on a daily basis. The talk will mostly focus on various design and implementation decisions influenced by microkernel nature of HelenOS and by current trends in graphics stack design found across both hobbyist and production-grade operating systems. [Estimated duration] 30 minutes + discussion

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[Microkernel-devroom] [TALK-PROPOSAL] File system policies and why we (have to) reinvent them
by Jiří Zárevúcky 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

Hello. Sorry about such a late proposal. I wasn't quite sure whether I want to propose the talk. [Title] File system policies and why we (have to) reinvent them [Full Name] Jiří Zárevúcky [Short Bio] Jiří is a computer science student and a small contributor to the HelenOS project with interest in making software safe using any means available. He participated in GSOC'11 creating portions of HelenOS' POSIX compatibility library and porting PCC compiler to it. He works on a bachelor's thesis designing and implementing a new VFS server for the HelenOS system. [Abstract] The talk presents the problems usually encountered in contemporary operating systems due to flawed or outdated file system concepts. One of possible different approaches is then presented and demonstrated using a VFS server that I am currently developing for HelenOS as my bachelor's thesis. The talk is centered around using dynamic, per-task namespaces that are able to express access permissions for applications as well as conventional user accounts, without any explicit concept of user or task identity, and without support from endpoint file system drivers, which can then be simplified. Although not strictly included in the topic of the talk, I might also give some space to the implementation issues, as the VFS server is developed using the Go programming language, departing from the usual practice of writing essential system components in C. [Estimated duration] 30 minutes + discussion

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[Microkernel-devroom] Talk-proposal: The microkernel OS Escape
by Nils Asmussen 11 Dec '12

11 Dec '12

Hi everyone, I would like to give the following talk: Title: The microkernel OS Escape My name: Nils Asmussen Length: 30-40 min. Abstract: Escape is a UNIX-like microkernel operating system which I'm developing since october 2008 as a hobby. It runs on x86 and the two rather exotic architectures ECO32 and MMIX. It supports multitasking, multithreading and SMP and has a quite advanced memory management. The userspace consists of drivers (ATA/ATAPI, ext2- and iso9660 filesystem, PCI, VGA, VESA and a few others), libraries (libc, libcpp), simple versions of the well known UNIX tools (ls, ps, cat, head, less, ...) and a small GUI. In the talk I'll give an overview about Escape and explain the most important concepts. Especially, I'll present the virtual file system that the kernel provides and that is among others used for getting access to drivers. Best regards, Nils

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[Microkernel-devroom] [TALK PROPOSAL] Every cloud has a silver lining and what we can learn from it
by Jakub Jermar 10 Dec '12

10 Dec '12

[Title] Every cloud has a silver lining and what we can learn from it [Full name] Jakub Jermář [Short bio] Jakub is a long-time developer of the HelenOS operating system and one of the project founders. Jakub helped to design and develop various parts of the system, including its kernel and the file system layer. [Estimated duration] 30m [Abstract] During the development of HelenOS, we have made a couple of wrong technical decisions that required a major fix later on. In this talk, I will mention several instances of these mistakes and describe how we fixed them. I will also attempt to generalize the cause of each problem and give some bold recommendations for avoiding it. The idea is to share this part of our experience with the other projects so that we can learn from each other.

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[Microkernel-devroom] [Talk-Proposal] Rathaxes - A DSL for device driver development, why and how?
by Louis Opter 08 Dec '12

08 Dec '12

Hello, Our turn to check in! First things first: - title of your talk: A DSL for device driver development, why and how? - your full name: Rathaxes; - duration of your talk: 30 minutes, without questions. Our abstract: Device drivers are notoriously known to be a critical and prominent part of modern operating systems. We will draw up a summary of the current state of the art in device driver development: tools, methodologies and approaches which try to mitigate the problem. Then, we will present our take on it: a domain specific language with its own aspect-oriented programming paradigm, and its compiler, Rathaxes. We will show you interesting details of an implementation, in the Rathaxes DSL, of the e1000 ethernet driver for Linux. We will conclude with how Rathaxes fits into the current state of the art, our vision, and next steps. And that's it! If you have any question, please let me know. We are also hanging out on freenode in the #rathaxes channel. Our homepage is: http://www.rathaxes.org/. Best -- Louis Opter

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