Accelerating Time-to-Market
From a development perspective , the main benefit of this approach is that you have the freedom to build your applications in virtual machines , with all of the normal development tools and language options . You can also run other large or legacy applications that would be far too expensive to port to native seL4 and to formally verify . The use case for this design is to have little development done on seL4 . This approach is being widely used in both defense and commercial industries .
Figure
4-3 . Using seL4 as a hypervisor .
This option is also used as an initial step to a migration of an existing system to seL4 . The typical process to retrofit an existing system to run on top of seL4 is to start by separating trusted and untrusted components and isolating them into virtual machines and slowly migrating key components ( trusted ) into seL4 native applications . This may culminate in a third architecture option : a combination of some applications running in VMs and applications running directly in seL4 execution space .
The market demand for trustworthy systems is accelerating . However , this endeavor is not for the faint of heart . The expertise needed to build and certify these systems is limited . However , by building upon a high assurance stack , you can significantly reduce your time to market and your ongoing development and certification costs . Also , keep in mind that choices early on can have a significant impact on overall costs , particularly when it comes to certification . We recommend talking to a certification expert early on . We have included a list of several companies in the appendices .
We have been exploring ways to make this journey shorter , with lower costs , and more enjoyable . The high assurance software stack that we proposed is one option to consider . For DDS , seL4 creates an enriched , low cost , small footprint , high assurance alternative for our customers . For seL4 , DDS provides an open standards-based communications protocol . DDS will
Journal of Innovation 99