On Sunday 14. January 2018 22.16.39 address@hidden wrote:
In 2016 David Craven has sent an email about his attempt in using sel4
(genode with sel4 to be exact) with guix
(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2016-12/msg00058.html).
Do
You know if he succeeded or not? And if not where there any
substantial
blockers or just lack of time?
He referenced some work done to use Nix with Genode, since abandoned,
but the
Genode documentation provides more details about this:
"The design of Genode's package-management concept is largely
influenced by
Git as well as the Nix package manager. In particular the latter opened
our
eyes to discover the potential that lies beyond the package management
employed in state-of-the art commodity systems. Even though we
considered
adapting Nix for Genode and actually conducted intensive experiments in
this
direction (thanks to Emery Hemingway who pushed forward this line of
work), we
settled on a custom solution that leverages Genode's holistic view on
all
levels of the operating system including the build system and tooling,
source
structure, ABI design, framework API, system configuration,
inter-component
interaction, and the components itself. Whereby Nix is designed for
being used
on top of Linux, Genode's whole-systems view led us to simplifications
that
eliminated the needs for Nix' powerful features like its custom
description
language."
http://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/package_management
(This is actually quite typical of Genode's online documentation, which
seems
to have a "white paper" feel at times (and a "manifest" feel, just
summarising
details, at others), so digesting it all can be time-consuming work.)
Personally, I have spent some time looking at L4Re rather than Genode,
mostly
because I have been wanting to deploy Fiasco.OC and it would appear
that these
two things (L4Re and Fiasco.OC) are developed more closely together.
Genode
seems to bundle specific versions of Fiasco.OC, but I have been needing
to get
updates and make fixes in a more convenient relationship with
Fiasco.OC's
upstream.
There was a remark about the Hurd in the previous thread. The one
difference I
tend to perceive between the Hurd and systems like L4Re and Genode is
that the
latter things tend to be demonstrated almost like embedded solutions -
you
build a specific payload and that is your system - whereas the Hurd
behaves
like the open-ended system we are familiar with from our desktop
computers.
That said, Genode is supposed to be usable as a desktop operating
system, and
will apparently introduce "a minimalistic generic live system that can
be
interactively shaped into a desktop scenario by the user without any
reboot":
https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/17.11
Another difference, this time between Genode and L4Re, is the way the
components seem to be wired up. Genode appears to use some kind of XML
syntax
for this:
http://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/init
Whereas L4Re employs Lua for the same job. I cannot comment on Genode,
but the
L4Re framework seems to be something of a work in progress.
A vague goal of mine is to try and bring Fiasco.OC or something similar
within
the realm of the Hurd again. There was once a project to port the Hurd
to a L4
microkernel, but that stalled in various ways and also didn't involve
the more
modern L4 variants that are around today and are supported by Genode.
Sorry if this was something of a digression from the topic!
Paul