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 Embox , one of the RTOS represented in Russia, was a bit shocked. No, everyone in Russia knows that except for BolgenOS and some regular cuts, we are not able to do anything!
But first, the event took place in the main building of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and such a solid organization would hardly have missed schoolchildren’s crafts, and secondly, comments were written by users of Habr, which means technically literate people, and in their knowledge of Alt Linux , KolibriOS , PhantomOS , ReactOS can hardly be doubted. I decided not to intervene in the discussion, but to write my own opinion on what happened following 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 covered here.

Safety, security and safety again

On the first day, almost everyone talked about security problems and ways to solve it. For some, this is the use of open source software, for someone it is the implementation and implementation of regulatory documents, someone suggested their own methods of solving problems at the architectural 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 have aroused quite a lot of interest among the participants, which means that such problems are really interesting.
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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 proposed approach to ISP RAS to security is to improve the process of developing and using appropriate technologies.

Comrades from Kaspersky Lab, I, as a developer of embedded systems, were pleased with the fact that they showed work on a piece of iron with an imx6 processor (ARMv7). Their report , as expected, was devoted to the operating system KasperskyOS. We were shown a box with not very clear content, but they explained the idea of ​​the proposed solution.

As I understood it, it was as follows:

• There are restrictions on the software being developed: in fact, the application software can only provide a certain service with a predefined interface. In principle, any micronuclear architecture is suitable for this.
  
  
• There is a certain server (service) of security, which passes through all IPC-messages, or, in fact, requests for services.
  
  
• The security service has access to security descriptors that can be imposed on any public call in other services. Descriptor constraints are developed in DSL (specialized language), separate from the core business logic.

As a result, if an error is found in a system that is already on some industrial facility, then you can not withdraw it for flashing, but simply update the security descriptors.

SPO and cooperation

One of the first speakers was the director of ISP RAS, Harutyun Avetisyan .

I liked the report, even though there were promotional notes. One of the key points of the report, as I understood it, was that the institute has extensive experience in working with STRs. Since system software, and not only system software, should be of world quality, it is necessary to unite and jointly develop open source software, since individual companies and institutions cannot do this.

In principle, the majority of projects and companies participating in the conference, as well as the majority of participants, are to one degree or another associated with open source software. Often, questions and reports were heard on how to 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, Sergey Anosov stated that Sailfish OS is a domestic system because it was entered in the register of domestic software, and provided a certificate in confirmation (can be seen in the presentation ). And Yegor Vasilyev said that GosLinux has not been entering this very registry for a year now! In principle, this is not necessary, since it is impossible to buy it, that is, it is free, you can download it and, after receiving permits, use it.

Of course, among the most active speakers and “questioners” were the employees of Basalt (formerly Alt Linux). Sometimes they reached for easy trolling, because they have the original basic platform, and those who do on Debian, CentOS, and others depend on their 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, the company Mellanox Technologies made a prototype switch on the ALT OS.

Another topic was the fight with Windows. More precisely, not a struggle, but an interaction: someone complained about licensing fonts and office programs, someone suggested using Mono to launch applications, but I would probably mention only Alexey Koptev 's report from RedSoft. He told about the problem with the crypto library under wine and how it was solved. I remember the report because the developers preferred 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, colleagues on the issue have long 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 lies in the fact that its own infrastructure is deployed in Russia both for applications and for 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 Tizen-RT IoT solutions. It was presented by Vyacheslav Tyrtov, a leading engineer of Samsung R & D Institute RUS. That is, an employee of Samsung, not Tayzen. The new OS is based on NuttX , and part of the report was devoted to her.

In order not to be convicted of bias, I note that Sailfish OS offers corporate solutions with closed or not so great app stores and a private infrastructure in general.

Science, religion and delirium mad

This section, even several sections, combined reports that offered some new ideas and concepts in the field of operating systems. The idea that it is possible to introduce something new into Software and build software on other principles sometimes arises, because there are very few changes in this area since UNIX and the microkernel.

Of course, the main place in terms of new concepts is occupied by PhantomOS. There were two reports. One of the author of the OS Phantom Dmitry Zavalishin , he was devoted to the features of the architecture “ Elbrus-2000 ” (E2K), which the OS is currently porting to. The second report was from Professor Innopolis Evgeny Zuev . His report was devoted to the possible directions of development of OS Phantom. On the basis of the 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.

Dmitry Cherukhin , a mad scientist at Moscow State University, was very pleased that he had written his OS from scratch, which has its own network protocol stack, and on this basis a web server is spinning for students' test tasks (the server’s address can be seen on the speaker’s page above). There is a repository on github . This OS is called LDuS (Long Dmirtiy u Svetlana). It was built according to original principles. If interested, you can watch his presentation.

Stanislav Bratanov from Intel company also presented the original concept of Resource-Owner-Service (ROS). 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 in Habré, but it was interesting to hear about it live. True, many of the listeners of the report agreed that it describes Erlang .

There was also a purely scientific report from Evgeny Klimenko , he proposed a manager of memory management for microkernels based on the original model. Since in a nutshell it is difficult to convey, it is better to look at 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 purchased RTOS remained without support. I had to invent something along the way.

JetOS from the consortium were presented: GosNIAS (speaker Yuri Solodelov ), ISP RAS (speaker Nikolay Pakulin ), Digital Zone. And MOS-OP from the company Weiss-Technika (speaker Alexei Frolov ). The work of JetOS could be seen at the technology booth.

Some more new OS

It was presented two more new closed OS.

Valery Egorov from Cryptosoft presented the QP OS. And he said that the companies developed not only the OS, but also the hypervisor, compiler and the .NET machine.

Pavel Boyko from AstroSoft introduced the MAXR to the Internet of Things. According to the speaker, the main feature of this RTOS is distributed shared memory.

Since both of the presented developments are proprietary, the listeners had, it seemed to me, skepticism. Especially to the MAKS RTOS, it even sounded on the sidelines that this is a good student work, but it is somewhat strange to offer it as a product for which they take money.

Summary

I would like to finish with the words of a comrade from Samsung, the same company that took as the basis of its platform, not our wonderful Embox , but the foreign NuttX :
“It’s good that in our country they have begun to do at least something in this area . ”