Muen

The following list outlines the most-prominent features of the Muen kernel:

Tau0 (τ₀) is the Muen System Composer. In its current static mode of operation, the task of Tau0 is to compose a system image while making sure that certain invariants are not violated. The Tau0 concept is a mechanism to gradually increase the flexibility of component-based systems running on top of Muen, while keeping a high level of assurance regarding the correctness of isolation enforcement. Read more about Tau0 here.

The Muen platform includes re-usable components which implement common services:

Furthermore the [muenblock], [muenevents], [muenfs] and [muennet] Linux kernel modules provide block I/O, inter-subject event, virtual filesystem and network interface drivers based on inter-subject memory channels.

The Muen platform includes a versatile toolchain which facilitates the specification and construction of component-based systems in different application domains.

The [mugenhwcfg] tool for automated hardware description generation simplifies the addition of support for new target machines. There is also a Debian Live-based bootable image [mugenhwcfg-live] with persistence to simplify the collection of hardware configurations from new targets.

The current development branch of Muen provides preliminary support for running Muen on AMD Zynq™ UltraScale+™ MPSoC evaluation boards. See the instructions below.

The following detailed project documentation is available:

The muen-dev@googlegroups.com mailing list is used for project announcements and discussions regarding the Muen separation kernel.

Muen is built using the Bob Build Tool [bob], install it via pipx:

Further variants of installing bob are described here: https://bob-build-tool.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#install.

We recommend using the following bob user configuration in ~/.config/bob/default.yaml:

Replace the example number 32 with your desired job count (e.g. number of CPU cores of your build machine). The sandbox: dev setting instructs bob to build in a containerized environment.

Once bob is ready, clone the Muen recipes and update all layers:

Execute the bob ls command to list all available root recipes. Pick one and build it using the bob dev <recipe_name> command, e.g.:

To build an ARM64 demo system for the QEMU-emulated ZCU102, issue the following command:

To ease kernel development and testing, the Muen project makes use of nested virtualization provided by QEMU/KVM.

Issue the following command in the project directory to start the Muen system in QEMU:

The number 1 indicates that a sandboxed build should be used. The system serial output is written to serial.out. Follow the on-screen instructions on how to connect to the QEMU curses console or how to SSH into the NIC Linux guest VM of the demo system.

To run an ARM64 system execute contrib/runQemu_arm64.sh accordingly.

It’s also possible to run all virtualized scenarios via the continuous integration (CI) system:

This will build and test all QEMU-emulated systems automatically, writing all artifacts to the given output directory. To put a specific system under test:

See ci/run.sh -h for all available options.

To build a bootable ISO file, execute the following command:

This will build a system for the Lenovo T430s hardware which can be dumped on a USB stick. If the desired system is not already present when executing the bob ls command, add it to the x86.yaml recipe accordingly (use the entry for the Lenovo T430s hardware as a template).

To build the minimal demo for the Xilinx MPSoC execute:

Then copy dev/dist/arm64-xilinx-zcu104-minimal-debug/1/workspace/BOOT.bin to a suitable SD card and power on the board.