Sebastian Mancke

The people from TU Dresden sent me an L4 image for the Neo (gta01 atm). It is booting very fast (some seconds) and shows a responsive GUI: impressive!

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L4 is a microkernel which allows a clean separation and isolation of tasks. It is applicable for realtime or trusted computing scenarios, where special tasks have to be executed in a isolated environment with higher control. Fiasco, the L4 implementation from Dresden is able to run a complete Linux on top of it. So the vision is to run OpenMoko as one L4-Task of the OpenMoko and encapsulate security sensible parts (e.g. GSM control, network stack) in separate tasks.

Unfortunately the armv4 instruction set makes virtualization very expensive, so this vision may take until we get free phones with an armv6 . The Fiasco L4 implementation is GPLv2. The Neo port is not published yet, but this is planed.