I’ve seen this video of Timothy Roscoe at USENIX ATC '21 recently and was very interested in multikernel OSes.
While Barrelfish is abandoned, it seems that Kirsch is his successor.
However, since I’ve seen this video I wonder what changed since the keynote, why it doesn’t seem to be a thing for mainstream kernels and if there was any roadmap/will to expand mainstream kernels like linux to embrace the whole hardware.
Do you have any pointers/ideas or resources to share on this?
Roscoe is one of my professors at ETH, and he gave a keynote at VISCon a few months ago where he discussed this stuff and what his department is working on. Apparently a lot of their (they being the systems department at ETH) current work is related to formally modeling which parts of a system have access to what other parts, and then figuring out which of those permissions are actually needed and then deriving the strictest possible MPU configuration while still having a working system. The advantage of this approach over an entirely new kernel is that, well, it doesn’t require an entirely new kernel, but can be built into an existing system, while still allowing them to basically eliminate the entire class of vulnerabilities they’re targeting.
That is generally called the principle of least privilege.