On Tuesday 11. December 2018 01.46.29 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
SE/L4. one research group actually created a complete minimum-compliant POSIX subsystem on top of SE/L4, absolutely nothing to do with any operating system "per se", and then successfully ported an entire qt-based webkit browser *and all its dependencies* to run on it.
Was this related to Genode or something else? I know that Genode supports/supported a WebKit browser - maybe Arora - and that it supports a range of microkernels, although the focus seems to be on using their favoured Nova microkernel instead these days [*].
the "filesystem" was entirely flat. no subdirectories. so when i say "minimally compliant" it really really was "minimally compliant".
That would be an odd decision to make given that it would need to have a filesystem of some kind and that beyond a rudimentary memory-based temporary filesystem, pretty much all of the ones out there have directories. If they'd gone to the trouble of porting a WebKit browser, porting an established filesystem would surely have been straightforward.
L4Re has virtual filesystem support, but it seems pretty limited in a number of ways, and the bulk of the heavy lifting needed to support dynamic linking seems to be left to a "rom" filesystem. But even that supports directories. (Of course, L4Re is not aimed at seL4, but there are fairly comparable things for seL4, I believe.)
Paul
[*] As is increasingly customary with various projects, I hesitate to depict Genode in any particular way, even after digging through the copious promotional/educational materials so that I might precipitate a coherent impression, in case it gets perceived as misrepresenting something or someone.