2024-03-27 – TS proudly announces the first release (0.1.0) of its new Lions Operating System. Lions OS is built from scratch on top of the seL4 microkernel and the seL4 Microkit.

Lions OS is aimed at embedded, IoT and cyberphysical systems and is designed to be formally verifiable, adaptable to a wide class of use cases in the target domain, while at the same time setting the benchmark for performance of microkernel-based operating systems. We expect to achieve all three aims by a highly modular yet ruthlessly performance-oriented design and strict adherence to the time-honoured KISS principle.

Lions OS is based on and intimately tied to the seL4 Device Driver Framework (sDDF), which we are also releasing for the first time, although development versions have been public for about 18 months. The sDDF is designed on the same principles as Lions OS and has already demonstrated networking performance exceeding that of the mainstream Linux OS.

2024-03-14 – Gernot Heiser has been formally inducted into the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in a ceremony in Halle. After being elected in 2023, Gernot travelled to Halle for the formal conferral ceremony in February. Election to Leopoldina membership is highly selective and testament to the groundbreaking nature of the work done by Trustworthy Systems.

Photo Credit: Markus Scholz for Leopoldina

2023-12-18 – US funding agency DARPA has just awarded their annual 10-year Game Changer Award for the most impactful program to the High Assurance Cyber-Military Systems (HACMS) program, as lead-CI Darren Cofer reports.
Led by Darren and Collins Aerospace, TS partnered with Galois, Boeing and the University of Minesota to deploy seL4 to protect autonomous air and ground vehicles from cyber attacks. The project formed the base from which TS is now aiming to make true OS security universal.

2023-12-12 – Premium electric-car maker NIO is co-funding TS's work on developing the Lions OS. NIO is a Premium Member of the seL4 Foundation and has recently announced that their seL4-based SkyOS will be on mass-produced cars next year.
We thank NIO for their strong support of the seL4 ecosystem!

2023-11-17 – Four TS undergraduate students, together with Gernot Heiser, attended the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) in Koblenz, Germany. Honours students Lucy Parker and Alwin Joshy, and 3rd-year students Mathieu Paturel and Krishnan Winter, had all won travel scholarships that funded the bulk of the trip expenses.

Krishnan presented a paper at the co-located Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS). The paper, titled "Pancake: verified systems programming made sweeter”, was co-authored by TS members Johannes Åman Pohjola, Miki Tanaka, Gordon Sau, Ben Nott, Tiana Tsang Ung, Craig McLaughlin, and Gernot Heiser, as well as external collaborators Hira Taqdees Syeda, Remy Seassau, Magnus Myreen and Michael Norrish.

Krishnan said of the opportunity, “It was an amazing experience to represent TS and the Pancake project at PLOS, as well as providing the opportunity to learn about all the innovative research currently undergoing in the systems world.”

Lucy Parker and Mathieu Paturel presented posters at the main conference, generating lots of interesting discussion about seL4. Mathieu said, “I had a really good time at SOSP, I got to meet some great verification people with a very keen interest in systems (and some really cool systems people of course). For me, the talks between the talks were by far the most interesting, and presenting our posters was much more fun than I expected.”