OS Day in Innopolis

Recently, I attended the OS Day operating system conference. The organizers were Dmitry Zavalishin , the author of OS Phantom , and ISP RAS . This is the second conference, and this time it was held in conjunction with the RIF . Both of these events were confined to the official opening of the city of Innopolis, in which, in fact, everything happened.

I will only talk about OS Day events, because I myself participated in most of them.

Paying tribute to the hospitable Innopolis, I will say that according to my feelings, the results are much more noticeable than in Skolkovo. The construction is very active, the university is already working with might and main, and in general life in the city really exists, which cannot but inspire hope for a bright future.

')

OS Day

OS Day is a conference of domestic developers of operating systems. As Dmitry Zavalishin put it, in the past 2014, he, together with the Institute for System Programming (ISP RAS), decided to gather everyone who is somehow connected with the development of operating systems. Surprisingly, quite a lot of people gathered, and not only from companies involved in the creation of Linux distributions (ALT Linux, ROSA), but also from the RV OS development teams. Of course, Dmitry also spoke with the experimental OS Phantom, and there was an interesting report from ISP RAS on the verification of operating systems. However, the number of reports on real-time systems was much greater.

OS RV

The reasons are probably clear: the creation of a general-purpose operating system from scratch does not make sense, and besides, it is hardly feasible in the foreseeable future. But for real-time systems, in particular, onboard systems, the creation of a specialized OS can be quite justified and doable task. Indeed, on the one hand, there is no open analog of VxWorks, and on the other hand, the functionality required by the OS, and, consequently, the labor costs, is much lower. This resulted in the fact that the OS OS theme became the main one at the second conference.

ISP RAS

A reporter from the Institute of Academy of Sciences, RAS, Aleksey Khoroshilov, made a report in which, in particular, he noted the difficulty of using Linux for critical systems and the fact that Linux, as a universal OS, is in principle redundant for real-time systems. In addition, he proposed an approach that allows the use of Linux in real-time systems, namely, the use of a special hypervisor. The idea is not new: for example, a similar proposal was made in the commentary to one of my articles . Actually, this idea is known as the MILS architecture, according to which all systems complying with the ARINC-653 standard should be built. Interestingly, another member of the institute, Nikolay Pakulin , spoke about the implementation of the hypervisor at the Institute of Instrument and Engineering, RAS. True, he talked more about security based on the hypervisor, but the obvious connection between the reports was certainly traceable.

GosNIIAS

Another idea, this time new, at the second conference was the desire of the organizers to acquaint developers and consumers, that is, people who are interested in domestic operating systems. For onboard systems OS, GosNIIAS turned out to be such a consumer, being the state regulator of aviation systems. To be honest, I heard about them for the first time at the conference, so for more information, it is better to go to their website . There were two reports from this organization.

The first was from Anna Kahn , who spoke about current projects at their enterprise, and it was her report that sounded the idea of ​​creating a common domestic platform for avionics by common efforts, since their organization faced certain difficulties due to sanctions.

The second report was from Yuri Solodelov , who, in fact, spoke about those platforms (OS and on-board calculators), which are now used in the enterprise. As for the operating system, three foreign systems were named: VxWorks 653 (WindRiver), LynxOS-178 (Lynx Software Technologies) and PikeOS (SYSGO). The report also said that they would like to have a domestic competitor, but today none of the systems meet their requirements. Again, three systems were named again: MOS OP (“VIS-Technika”), OS RV Baguette (aka OS2000) (NIISI RAS) and EOS (St. Petersburg OKB “Elektroavtomatika”). Representatives of the first two companies were in the hall and made presentations, I will talk about them later. If I correctly understood the main problem, all of our RV OS manufacturers release them to their onboard systems, which imposes a number of restrictions on their use. And, of course, everyone shakes the source codes and does not give them to anyone.

Weiss-Technique

As for “MOS OP”, it was represented by Ilya Mezentsev . He was also present at the previous conference, though not representing the Weiss-Technique company, but the Ramenskoye instrument-making design bureau. This time, he did not provide details of the OS being represented. But based on the information from the first conference, I can say that this OS is based on the open source “Minix 3” . Unfortunately, the source code of the “MOS OP” itself is closed.

NIISI RAS

OS RV Baguette, or as the speaker from NIISI RAS, Alexander Godunov called it, OS2000 is probably quite well known. I note only that there is a whole family of OS Baguette. It was originally OS2000, then OS3000 appeared, which, as far as I understood, has an ARINC-653-compatible interface, and OS4000 also exists. I did not delve into the essence of the last of them, but I realized that there were some problems with property rights: the OS4000, it seems, claims the Sukhoi Design Bureau, and maybe even the copyright holder of this OS. In general, political wars are beyond the scope of my article. I can only say that Alexander made a good review of the standard ARINC-653.

The conference also presented two more systems that claim to be the OS for onboard systems. This is Elbrus OS from “MCST” and our project “Embox”

MCST

OS Elbrus was represented by Sergey Semenikhin. In principle, he honestly admitted that Elbrus OS is Debian with RT-Linux patches and E2K architecture patches superimposed on the kernel. An interesting point in his report was a criticism of the Linux kernel, namely, the places that the RT patch fixes. He also criticized POSIX for having fork, noting that the concept fork is not in ARINC-653.

Embox

About your own project, as you understand, it is difficult for me to tell. Of course, I would like to say that we are the best and the coolest, but probably, this is not very beautiful :) Therefore, I will give only dry facts. The project was represented by two speakers. Andrei Terekhov , as the head of the system programming department at St. Petersburg State University, at which, in fact, the project was born, and I, Anton Bondarev , as one of the project’s founders and general director of Embo LLC. Of the advantages that do not require evidence is the openness of the source code and the cross-platform project.

Round table

In summarizing the direction of the RTOS, a round table was held, at which a rather heated discussion arose. Everyone was talking about the need for cooperation, but each had its own vision of this cooperation. As a result, it was decided that the coordinator will be GosNIIAS as a person interested in creating a domestic RTOS for onboard use. Also, in order to somehow find the points of contact between the development teams, Dmitry Zavalishin put forward the idea of ​​developing a single interface for various modules of the future OS. Start decided to framebuffer. Let's see what happens.

Linux distributions

Of course, the substantive part of the conference was much broader than building a national RTOS. Moreover, the organizers decided to expand the subject of the conference and changed it to a conference of system and tool software developers. For example, there were several reports from the developers of the DBMS. But more on that later. To begin with, of course, you need to tell about the creators of Linux-distributions.

Unfortunately, this time ALTLinux was not represented at the conference. Perhaps the reason for this was the fact that ALTLinux entered into cooperation with ROSA and in the report of Vladimir Rubanov there were quite often references to ALTLinux and flashed its emblems.

As a result, three distributions created by domestic developers were presented at the conference: ROSA, Astra-Linux and GosLinux

Goslinux

If I heard quite a lot about the first two, for the first time I heard about the latter. He was represented by Egor Vasilyev , who heads the department of information protection in the “Federal Bailiff Service” (FSSP). I was very surprised, but delighted. I believe that such an initiative is a good example of the use of opensource in the state. sector. As a result, this distribution is installed on eight and a half thousand jobs. It has only the necessary certificate from the FSTEC, and this distribution seems to me more open to users, since everything you need is publicly available, and you only send a sticker from the FSTEC.

Astra-Linux

Astra-Linux from NPO RusBItekh has all types of safety certificates (FSTEC, Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, FSB). Speaker Andrei Borisov calls it a special-purpose operating system. The presence of certificates for all departments allows you to apply this distribution, including in interdepartmental systems. An interesting point in the report, in my opinion, was the story of the continuous life cycle of the distribution kit up to obtaining certificates.

Rosa

The report of Vladimir Rubanov was quite interesting, but I was not much surprised. But what really pleased us was the cooperation with ROSA and ALTLinux. I hope it will be useful for both manufacturers and, most importantly, for end users.

DBMS

As I said, this time the databases were presented at the conference. For me, the fact that we have database developers in our country was a small discovery. It turned out that there are two teams that participated in the development of well-known open DBMS.

PostgreSQL

This database was presented by Ivan Panchenko - co-founder and one of the leaders of Postgres Professional. Probably the most interesting and new in his report was information about the Russian contribution to the project. It turned out that one of the four founders of the project was a programmer from Krasnoyarsk (sorry, I don’t remember the names). And at the moment in his company there are three committers in the project.

RED Database

This is a new database, and at least I have not heard of it before. Therefore, in a nutshell: this is an open source server database based on the “Firebird” project. The latter fact is the most interesting, since Roman Simakov from the Red Soft company is an active developer of the Firebird database.
Among other interesting features, it is worth noting that this company is a subcontractor of the aforementioned FSSP, that is, their products are used, as well as the fact that the company has its own Linux distribution, which, however, was not mentioned.

Virtualization and clouds

Another focus of the conference was the visualization systems presented by Odin (formerly Parallels) and the cloud platform based on OpenStack from the TIONIX project.

OpenVZ was represented by two speakers: Sergey Bronnikov and Pavel Emelyanov . I think the topic of containers that are involved in the project is not needed. Sergey talked about, in principle, understandable things that make it difficult to implement easy container-based virtualization. And Pavel - about the CRUI project - the implementation of the technology of taking a cast of processes in Linux.

About OpenStack, too, did not hear anything particularly new. The project was presented by Radik Yusupov . It sounded like this: “we, in principle, do the same thing as Mirantis, that is, we provide ready-made settings and configurations for OpenStack”. But as far as I understand, the company also provides its own equipment, although I don’t quite understand why.

Other directions and topics

The conference lasted two days and, of course, I could not tell about all the reports and events that took place there. There were a lot of them: this is the round table “Do OSs need robots?”, And other reports: about mobile OSs and a very detached report about geophysical calculations on the cluster, with a proposal to figure out how such calculations will be carried out in the future. But I will note only one project, without which, probably, it is difficult to imagine the domestic OSebuilding. It's about ReactOS .

To represent ReactOS, I think, it is not necessary, there is enough information on the same habr. Just say a few words about the report. It was reported, however, not Alexey Bragin ( reactos ), but his colleague Alexander Rechitsky ( Jeditobe ). The main idea of ​​the report was the message that, based on ReactOS, the architecture of Windows is well studied. As a result, this report was almost the only one affecting the topic of learning system programming based on open source projects. And this, as I noted in my article , is perhaps the most effective way to teach anybody programming, much less systemic.

Results

The bottom line is that I have only positive feelings from the conference. The exception is probably unprecedented security measures for the passage on the first day of the conference. But it seems that it was not in vain that they suffered, because, as far as I know, on that day the council was held in the same building, at which it was decided to support the state with many of the projects and companies described above. So far, these are only words, the national platform has already been created, but let's hope for the best. I am glad that the state at least has noticed that it has system software developers.

Regarding the conference itself, it seems to me that there were not enough representatives of industry, that is, consumers who need these products; they were, but so far in single copies.

Well, for a complete picture of the OSEs: I think it was worthwhile to invite someone from KolibriOS . Maybe the OS itself will remain a refuge of geeks, after all, the assembler is a harsh business, but the development team clearly has an enviable competence in this matter.