Why it was worth visiting OS Day 17
Reading the comments on the article about the OS Day 2017 conference , I, as the developer of one of the Embox RTOS presented in Russia , was a little shocked. No, in Russia everyone knows that apart from BolgenOS and some regular cuts, we don’t know anything! But firstly, the event was held in the main building of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and it is unlikely that such a solid organization would have missed the crafts of schoolchildren, and secondly, comments were written by users of the hub, and therefore, technically competent people, and in their knowledge of Alt Linux , KolibriOS , PhantomOS , ReactOShardly doubtful. I decided not to interfere in the discussion, but to write my own opinion about what was happening as a result of this conference.
The article is by no means official, all official reports and press releases will be made by the organizers. Only moments that I personally remember will be highlighted here.
Security, safety and security again
On the first day, almost everyone talked about security issues and how to solve it. For some, this is the use of open source software, for some it is the implementation and execution of regulatory documents, someone suggested their own methods of solving problems at the architecture level.
I will not talk about several reports of the FSTEC, including the Deputy Director of the FSTEC Vitaly Lyutikov , because I am not an expert in the field of regulatory documents, but these reports aroused quite a lot of interest among the participants, which means that such problems are really interesting.
ISP RAS made several reports separately and in collaboration with other conference participants. On the first day, almost all of them were devoted to code analyzers. That is, the approach to security proposed by ISP RAS is to improve the development process and use appropriate technologies.
Comrades from Kaspersky Lab, as a developer of embedded systems, I was pleased that they showed work on a piece of iron with an imx6 processor (ARMv7). Their report , as one would expect, was devoted to the KasperskyOS operating system. They showed us a box with not very clear contents, but they explained the idea of the proposed solution.
As I understand it, it was as follows:
- Restrictions are imposed on the software being developed: in fact, application software can provide only a certain service with a predefined interface. In principle, any microkernel architecture is suitable for this.
- A certain server (service) of security is allocated, which passes through itself all IPC messages, or, in fact, requests for services.
- The security service has access to security descriptors, which can be imposed on any public call in other services. Constraints for descriptors are developed in DSL (specialized language), separately from the main business logic.
As a result, if an error is found in a system that is already standing on some industrial facility, then you can not revoke it for flashing, but simply update the security descriptors.
Open source software and cooperation
One of the first was the director of ISP RAS Harutyun Avetisyan .
I liked the report, although there were advertising notes. One of the key points of the report, as I understand it, was that the institute has rich experience in working with STR. Since system software, and not only system software, must be of world quality, it is necessary to unite and jointly develop open source software, as this is beyond the power of individual companies and institutions.
In principle, most of the projects and companies speaking at the conference, as well as most of the participants, are more or less connected with open source software. Often questions and reports were heard about exactly how they would contribute, to which projects, and so on.
Import substitution
This is probably the most frequently mentioned and most provocative direction!
For example, in his report, Sergei Anosov said that Sailfish OS is a domestic system because it is included in the registry of domestic software, and cited a certificate in confirmation (can be seen in the presentation ). And Yegor Vasilyev said that GosLinux has not been added to this registry for a year now! In principle, this is not necessary, since it is impossible to buy, that is, it is free, you can download it and, after receiving permits, use it.
Of course, some of the most active speakers and “questioners” were Basalt employees (former Alt Linux). Sometimes they came to easy trolling, because they have an original base platform, and those who do on Debian, CentOS and others depend on the respective community.
In general, the conference was attended by users and developers of most of the popular Linux distribution families. The chip was an attempt by some companies to enter into cooperation, for example, Mellanox Technologies made a prototype of the switch on the ALT OS.
Another topic was the struggle with Windows. More precisely, it’s not a struggle, but just interaction: someone complained about licensed fonts and office programs, someone suggested using Mono to run applications, but I’ll probably only mention the reportAlexey Koptev from RedSoft. He talked about the problem with the crypto library under wine and how it was solved. I remembered the report by the fact that the developers chose not to violate the license agreements, but found the correct way to solve this problem by writing the appropriate patch. In addition, it turned out that many companies have the same problem, and already on the sidelines of the issue, comrades-in-arms for a long time discussed this topic.
Mobile platforms and corporate segment
Two “domestic” platforms were presented at the conference: Taizen.ru and the previously mentioned Open Mobile Platform (Sailfish Mobile OS RUS). The platform is that Russia has deployed its own infrastructure for both applications and assembly and development.
In my opinion, Taizen looked much better. This is not surprising, because behind it is all the power of Samsung. The main part of the report was devoted to the presentation of the new part of Tizen for IoT Tizen-RT solutions . Presented by Vyacheslav Tyrtov, a leading engineer at Samsung R&D Institute RUS. That is, an employee of Samsung, not Taizen. The new OS is based on NuttX , and part of the report was dedicated to it.
In order not to be convicted of bias, I note that Sailfish OS offer enterprise solutions with closed or not-so-very app stores and generally a private infrastructure.
Science, religion and the delirium of the mad
This section, even several sections, united reports that offered some new ideas and concepts in the field of operating systems. The very idea that you can bring something new to OS building and build software on other principles occasionally arises, because in this area there are very few changes since UNIX and the microkernel.
Of course, the main place in terms of new concepts for us is PhantomOS. There were two reports. One from the author of the OS Phantom Dmitry Zavalishin , he was dedicated to the features of the Elbrus-2000 architecture (E2K), which is currently porting this OS. The second report was from Professor Innopolis Yevgeny Zuev. His report was devoted to possible directions for the development of Phantom OS. On the basis of Phantom OS and the Elbrus platform, with the help of a working group in Innopolis, it is planned to create a product that can be implemented not only in the educational process.
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Stanislav Bratanovfrom Intel also introduced the original Resource-Owner-Service (ROS) concept. This OS was developed in 1999 and in 2009 received its new development as an OS for sensor networks. I already read an article about this development on Habré, but it was interesting to hear about it live. True, many listeners agreed on what Erlang is described in it .
There was a purely scientific report from Eugene Klimenko , he proposed a memory management manager for micronuclei based on the original model. Since it is difficult to convey in a nutshell, it is better to see his theses and presentation.
Airborne systems
As one of the speakers put it, this section arose due to sanctions, that is, our companies were faced with the fact that even the purchased RTOS were left without support. I had to come up with something along the way.
JetOS from the consortium were presented: GosNIAS (speaker Yuri Solodelov ), ISP RAS (speaker Nikolai Pakulin ), Digital Zone. And MOS-OP from Weiss-Technika (speaker Alexey Frolov ). JetOS work could be seen at the technology stand.
Some more new OS
Two more new closed OSs were introduced.
Valery Egorov from Cryptosoft introduced QP OS. And he said that the company has developed not only the OS, but also the hypervisor, compiler and .NET machine.
Pavel Boyko from AstroSoft introduced the RTOS MAX for the Internet of Things. The main feature of this RTOS, according to the speaker, is distributed shared memory.
Since both of the presented developments are proprietary, the audience arose, as it seemed to me, skepticism. Especially for the Max RTOS, it even sounded on the sidelines that this was a good student work, but offering it as a product for which they charge money is somewhat strange.
Summary
I would like to end with the words of a friend from Samsung,
“It's good that they started to do something in this country in our country . ”