To begin collaborating with others, we’ve open sourced several components for our secure operating system, called KataOS, on GitHub, as well as partnered with Antmicro on their Renode simulator and related frameworks. As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Through the seL4 CAmkES framework, we’re also able to provide statically-defined and analyzable system components. KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user’s privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel’s hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. KataOS is also implemented almost entirely in Rust, which provides a strong starting point for software security, since it eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows.
Another new open source operating system by Google. This time, it seems almost entirely focused on embedded machine learning applications, so it’s definitely a bit outside of my wheel house.
And it is under the Apache license, different from the MIT-style license Zircon kernel and BSD-style on FuchsiaOS user space components.
Another nugget from the git repo highlights that although its only released for a
” For now the only target that works is “aarch64″ (for a raspi3b machine running in simulation on qemu).”
But its ultimate target is for RISC V
“Our primary development environment uses Renode for simulation of our Sparrow hardware design. Renode allows us to do rapid software/hardware co-design of our multi-core RISC-V target platform. ”
So aarch64 now, but they are going to drop that for a custom Google designed RISC-V! Very interesting indeed.