Status & Roadmap #

We have had a couple of alpha releases of LionsOS now.

We have a number of example systems that show off the features and capabilities of LionsOS on a number of ARM and RISC-V platforms.

We have various I/O device classes and are getting to the point where there are enough device class designs to make useful systems. For a full list of the device classes and drivers we support, see sDDF.

As we have been doing development on LionsOS itself, we are making more and more complex systems that get closer to real-life deployable systems.

By doing so we have been able to improve the usability and off-the-shelf functionality that LionsOS provides, but there is still much work that is being done on LionsOS and is to be done in the future.

Short term roadmap #

Below are a couple projects we are actively working on and the general direction we are taking for the next couple months.

Better tooling #

With release 0.3.0 we introduced metaprogramming tooling to make it easier to develop a LionsOS system. There are still many areas to improve with this tooling and are doing so as we use it more and more internally.

The two other main areas to help the usability of LionsOS is proper GDB support. and performance profiling.

The profiler is still under-going a lot of experimentation but GDB support is close to being merged in and available for use.

x86-64 support #

While we have support for various ARM and RISC-V platforms, there is community interest for x86-64 support which we are actively working on.

This requires a number of changes to seL4 Microkit itself as well as basic drivers such as ethernet and SATA/AHCI in sDDF.

We also working on porting our virtual-machine-monitor to support VMs on x86-64.

Long term roadmap #

The following are features we have experimented or are actively working on but are still a while away from being available for use.

More dynamicism #

While LionsOS will continue to only support a static architecture, we have worked on two areas to improve the level of dynamicism that LionsOS supports.

The first is adapting sDDF drivers such that they can handle dynamic changes at the device level. The main use-cases we are trying to support here are unplugging/plugging into an ethernet port or SD card slot while the system is running.

The second is ‘PD templates’. This is primarily a change within Microkit itself, and so you can find more details on the Microkit roadmap.

Containers #

We currently have a project that aims to turn LionsOS into a library OS that supports container-like applications that can be spun up and destroyed on demand. This ties into the ‘PD templates’ feature outlined above.

We are also interested in exploring using a Web Assembly runtime combined with WASI to implement similar usability, but have not started working on this yet.