seL4 Micro-Kernel Working Towards A General-Purpose, Multi-Server OS

The seL4 micro-kernel that has been in development for over a decade saw the creation of the seL4 Foundation last year to further the project's goals. In 2020 the seL4 micro-kernel also added RISC-V as one of its primary CPU architectures.

The seL4 micro-kernel and its ecosystem continue on an upward trajectory even with everything going on in the world and competition from other open-source kernels. Today during the FOSDEM Online 2021 event there was a presentation by Professor Gernot Heiser on the seL4 advancements over the past year.

In addition to the establishing of the seL4 Foundation and adding the open-source RISC-V architecture as one of their primary architectures, the seL4 micro-kernel has been seeing a lot of work and also research into future work. Among the ambitious research goals is to create a "truly secure, general-purpose OS". This multi-server OS would be secure, support a range of use-cases and security policies, and perform comparable to monolithic systems.

Those wanting to learn more about the recent and ongoing research work into seL4 can see Gernot's PDF presentation from the virtual FOSDEM event. Those wanting to read up more on the seL4 micro-kernel this weekend can do so at sel4.systems.