Welcome to the Fiasco µ-kernel!

If you are new to this site, please start exploring it at the overview page.

What's new

26 Sep 2005

Fiasco 1.2 released!
This release fixes many bugs, a few features have been added as well. For a list of changes please consult the CHANGES file. Get the package from the download directory or from CVS. Refer to the README file for further information.

11 Feb 2004

Fiasco documentation added
Documents describing the Fiasco build system and the coding style used in the Fiasco microkernel are now available. You can find them here.

11 Nov 2003

Fiasco 1.1 released!
Since the last release many bugs were fixed as well as new features added. Noteworthy parts include ARM support and JDB support for Fiasco-UX. All other changes are listed in the CHANGES file of the release. Get the files from our download directory and refer to the README file in the package for further information regarding this release.

14 Apr 2003

DROPS demo disk available
The DROPS team has compiled a demonstration floppy disk with various applications. It uses Fiasco, so you may be interested in the disk as well. Get it here.

4 Apr 2003

Fiasco patches
To fix bugs which have been discovered after a release has been made, we supply patches which can be applied to the current release tree.

2 Apr 2003

Fiasco 1.0 released!
Fiasco has matured over the years and is now stable enough to be released with a non-zero version number. Find more information in the README file accompanying the release.

3 Feb 2003

Udo finished the main work on the Fiasco-UX port, it's now on the same level as the x86 version. So be sure to try it out! (See this page how to get and use it.)

Additionally, Alex added the L4/X.0 interface to Fiasco.

6 Jun 2002

Fiasco gets portable! Alexander Warg ported Fiasco to the IA64 architecture (Itanium). You can read about his port in his term paper. His work is already available from our public CVS server as a branch, and Alexander will merge his work into the main version of Fiasco within the next few weeks.

Also, Udo Steinberg has been porting Fiasco to run on top of Unix in user mode (also available from a CVS branch). This port will allow development of L4 applications under Unix, and will also help with kernel debugging.

10 May 2002

The last important feature arrives: Hendrik Tews has implemented I/O flexpages! Fiasco is now safe and feature-complete enough to be used in production systems. We declare it to be of beta quality.

23 Jul 2001

The L4 webpages sport a new L4 Developer's Bibliography. Have a look at it!

17 Jul 2001

Added automatically-generated Fiasco source-code documentation to the website.

10 Jun 2001 In Memoriam Jochen Liedtke Prof. Dr. Jochen Liedtke, chair of the System Architecture Group at the University of Karlsruhe, passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, June 10th. Jochen was the main visionary behind the L4 microkernel interface. The L4 community loses an excellent teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.

1 May 2001

Michael Hohmuth and Hermann Härtig have published a USENIX '01 paper ``Pragmatic nonblocking synchronization for real-time systems.'' This paper describes Fiasco's synchronization mechanisms in detail.

19 Mar 2001

Fiasco's built-in kernel debugger Jdb now has its own manual. Thanks to Jan Glauber who has extended the debugger and the L4KD manual!

23 Jan 2001

Hendrik Tews and colleagues have written an introduction to the VFiasco project, which aims at a formally verified and high-level security-certified microkernel: VFiasco - Towards a Provably Correct Microkernel.

If you are a student at TU Dresden, you might be interested in our asssignment and project list for VFiasco.

15 Dec 2000

Fiasco now uses the Preprocess C++ preprocessor. The result is shorter, more maintainable, more logically cohesive, easier-to-read, easier-to-change code.

11 Oct 2000

New synchronization code and short-IPC shortcut have landed in main trunk. This has resulted in a considerable speed-up, especially for the most-common short IPC. Kudos to Michael Peter for most of this work!

2 Aug 2000

Frank Mehnert has implemented the RT-Linux API on top of L4 and has compared the real-time characteristics of Fiasco, L4/x86, and RT-Linux.

20 Mar 2000

Hendrik Tews carried out a case study that applies coalgebraic specification and verification techniques to Fiasco. A part of the memory management of Fiasco was specified in the Coalgebraic Class Specification Language CCSL. With the support of a modern theorem prover (namely PVS) it was possible to check the source code of Fiasco against this specification. It turns out that, on the basis of coalgebras and with the use of state of the art tools like PVS and CCSL, it becomes feasible to verify practically used operation-system software.

28 September 1999

Released a new package called oskit10_support which adapts the current OSKit 0.97 to Fiasco and L4. With this library, many OSKit applications can run unchanged on top of Fiasco and L4. This package is part of the l4 module - download it via remote CVS!

8 June 1999

From now on, the latest version of Fiasco is always available via read-only remote CVS!

5 Jan 1999

Introduced a new bug tracking system.