Hi there!
In my opinion, the problem discussed here can be solved quite well using yocto or buildroot or something else. If I ever find the time, I'd be happy to publish my yocto build environment for l4re. But maybe someone else will be faster?
I'd like to thank you for the many very valuable tips posted here.
Torsten
Am Do., 15. Mai 2025 um 00:34 Uhr schrieb l4-hackers-request@os.inf.tu-dresden.de:
Send l4-hackers mailing list submissions to l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de
To subscribe or unsubscribe via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to l4-hackers-request@os.inf.tu-dresden.de
You can reach the person managing the list at l4-hackers-owner@os.inf.tu-dresden.de
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of l4-hackers digest..."
Today's Topics:
- Re: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.) (Marcus Hähnel)
- Re: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.) (Paul Boddie)
- RE: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.) (Richard Clark)
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 14 May 2025 16:52:48 +0200 From: Marcus Hähnel support@kernkonzept.com Subject: Re: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.) To: Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk, l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de Message-ID: c648158693b4e8f556b4d371f74e7751dce80e40.camel@kernkonzept.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
On Mon, 2025-05-12 at 22:37 +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:
On Monday, 12 May 2025 15:09:52 CEST Marcus Hähnel wrote:
On Mon, 2025-05-05 at 11:25 +0000, Richard Clark wrote:
But that brings me to a bigger question. How do I fetch only Long-Term-Support or Fully-Tested-and-Blessed versions? Github is woefully lacking in proper version support. I can't send random untested code to my customers.
All code we push to Github went through our internal QA process, running compile checks for all our supported architectures as well as an extensive test suite on different platforms and configurations. So from that point of view I would say you can consider all code pushed to Github as “Fully-Tested-and-Blessed”.
I don't have a strong opinion about quality assurance for people wanting to provide solutions for paying customers, but I have personally wondered how I might successfully and conveniently reproduce repository configurations when creating new L4Re development environments.
For example, if I decide to work on support for a new board, I might want to replicate the L4Re configuration I have been using for another board. Starting from scratch, it was possible to use the ham tool, but despite it apparently maintaining version details for the different repositories, it wasn't particularly clear how one might preserve or export that metadata for further use.
I now see that there is another tool involved:
https://l4re.org/getting_started/bob.html
Although that doesn't seem to replace the ham tool:
https://l4re.org/getting_started/make.html
Naturally, one might say that this is the point at which anyone serious-enough about using L4Re would get in touch with Kernkonzept and start talking business, but such a lack of clarity tends to suggest that either there aren't particularly adequate solutions for such fundamental needs or that any adequate solutions that may exist aren't for people merely investigating or evaluating the technology.
Again, it isn't my concern if there's a business decision involved that everybody feels comfortable with, and if there's a steady stream of interested customers that seems to justify such a decision, but I could easily see potential users going elsewhere if the answer to simple questions is "talk to us". Even in reasonably large organisations, hitting an approval barrier that "talk to us" or "register your interest" represents can be a strong disincentive, especially if other solutions exist.
I accept that my opinion isn't important, however, since my own activities are confined to my own interests and driven by a general belief that L4Re represents a reasonable foundation for certain kinds of systems. That there isn't exactly much of a public community around L4Re could also be regarded as a disincentive for potential adopters, which is unfortunate.
Paul
Hi Paul,
thank you very much for your thoughtful message — it's really appreciated.
First of all: your opinion absolutely matters. The input from users like you, who engage deeply and share candid feedback, helps us make L4Re better. While we are aware that L4Re is still quite niche and the community small, we want to support it as best we can and would love to see it grow.
I think you're raising a different, but equally important, point compared to what Richard was asking. My original response focused on the idea of providing a fully tested release for a specific combination of software configuration and hardware, which is understandably difficult for us to maintain as part of the open-source offering given our limited resources.
Your concern — about being able to reproduce a known working state of your development environment — is much more fundamental. You're right: this should be straightforward, and if it's not, then it's something we want to improve. Ease of use and accessibility are important to us, and sometimes we’re just too close to the system to see where friction arises — so thank you again for pointing this out.
To clarify one key point: we don’t deliberately withhold features or usability improvements from the open-source version of L4Re to push people into commercial contact. That’s not our business philosophy. In fact, that would go directly against our goal of getting L4Re into more hands and making it easier to work with.
Some of the convenience features — like release tagging — do exist in our customer repositories, but it’s more of a workflow habit than a conscious decision to exclude them from GitHub. No one had brought up the need for that kind of reproducibility in the open repo so far — and now that you have, let’s fix it.
Would something like weekly tags on GitHub help you? For example, a tag like `l4re-2025-05-14` that you could use with `ham checkout` to reproduce that specific state?
Also, ham already supports pinned revisions in the manifest (`revision` attribute in `project` tags), so you can share a complete and reproducible state that way as well. But I agree that this could be made more convenient.
One possible improvement could be a `ham create-pinned-manifest` sub-command that generates such a manifest from your current state. That’s not trivial — it would require resolving different remotes and checking that all commits are actually reachable in one of the remotes — but it’s definitely doable. If you're interested, feel free to open a proposal or even an issue on the ham GitHub repository — we’d love to hear your thoughts or collaborate on a solution.
Would any of these ideas help in your workflow? Do you have something else in mind? We're always happy to improve L4Re together with the people who use it.
Best regards,
- Marcus Hähnel Principal Engineering Lead
-- +++ Register now for our workshop “Get to know L4Re in 3 days” on October 28–30. Learn to design and deploy secure system architectures for your product with L4Re: https://www.kernkonzept.com/workshop-getting-started-with-l4re/ +++
Kernkonzept GmbH Sitz: Dresden HRB 31129 Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Michael Hohmuth
Message: 2 Date: Wed, 14 May 2025 22:01:08 +0200 From: Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk Subject: Re: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.) To: l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de, Marcus Hähnel support@kernkonzept.com Message-ID: 2728648.BddDVKsqQX@jason Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
On Wednesday, 14 May 2025 16:52:48 CEST Marcus Hähnel wrote:
thank you very much for your thoughtful message — it's really appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to respond! I didn't really expect such a comprehensive reply, so it is much appreciated.
First of all: your opinion absolutely matters. The input from users like you, who engage deeply and share candid feedback, helps us make L4Re better. While we are aware that L4Re is still quite niche and the community small, we want to support it as best we can and would love to see it grow.
It is reassuring to hear that you take feedback into consideration, even from those of us who are not directly contributing to your work or, indeed, your business.
I think you're raising a different, but equally important, point compared to what Richard was asking. My original response focused on the idea of providing a fully tested release for a specific combination of software configuration and hardware, which is understandably difficult for us to maintain as part of the open-source offering given our limited resources.
I completely agree that if someone is in need of something that requires an investment of time and resources, then they should either invest their own time and resources, which is effectively what I have done over the last few years, or they should be prepared to compensate others for that work. Nobody should be required to do something for someone else for nothing - there is already too much of that happening in the open source world - not that any such request was made, I should add.
Productive access to specific hardware configurations has always been a challenge for software environment developers, and the collaboration required to deliver robust support for a given hardware platform can be difficult to coordinate. Even with today's hardware, mostly inexpensive from a historical perspective, there is still a substantial cost in developing the corresponding software support.
Your concern — about being able to reproduce a known working state of your development environment — is much more fundamental. You're right: this should be straightforward, and if it's not, then it's something we want to improve. Ease of use and accessibility are important to us, and sometimes we’re just too close to the system to see where friction arises — so thank you again for pointing this out.
To clarify one key point: we don’t deliberately withhold features or usability improvements from the open-source version of L4Re to push people into commercial contact. That’s not our business philosophy. In fact, that would go directly against our goal of getting L4Re into more hands and making it easier to work with.
I think it is fine to encourage people to make contact and to discuss opportunities, and I don't seriously believe that people are being herded in the direction of commercial support, but any kind of obstacle or hurdle in the independent evaluation of a technology can be dissuasive. Some evaluators are more likely to move on and look at other things than to cultivate some kind of dialogue.
This doesn't only happen in a commercial context. On plenty of occasions in academia, I saw researchers encouraging others to get in touch, in order to work around deficiencies in the way they had communicated or published their work. I also saw the long-term effects of this, where people could not account for what they had published after only a few years, with this emerging when I was actually making contact with them to try and distribute their originally published data.
Empowering other people as much as possible or practicable may eventually return such favours. When I return to my own work after a substantial period of time, it is almost as if I am just another person taking a look at it, too.
Some of the convenience features — like release tagging — do exist in our customer repositories, but it’s more of a workflow habit than a conscious decision to exclude them from GitHub. No one had brought up the need for that kind of reproducibility in the open repo so far — and now that you have, let’s fix it.
I can understand that it can be easy to overlook. How many times has one seen missing tags in public repositories because Git makes it easy to forget to push them? I also understand that publicly tagging releases can make mistakes difficult to rectify, but I suppose this is just another hazard of release management, and eventually we all get used to making "patch" releases.
Would something like weekly tags on GitHub help you? For example, a tag like `l4re-2025-05-14` that you could use with `ham checkout` to reproduce that specific state?
It might, but I think the challenge is then applying such tags to a large number of repositories. Naturally, one can write scripts to synchronise all those repositories, but isn't that what ham is supposed to achieve?
Richard also mentioned various other packages that ham doesn't cover, and having been working with the software for a long time now, there are still various packages that I have needed to retrieve from the Subversion repository for L4Re because they were never migrated to GitHub. I can understand that those packages are no longer a focus, and I have even eliminated some of them from my own environment, but they might still be used by the L4Re demonstrations.
Also, ham already supports pinned revisions in the manifest (`revision` attribute in `project` tags), so you can share a complete and reproducible state that way as well. But I agree that this could be made more convenient.
Unfortunately, I never discovered this, but I assumed that you must have a way to capture the state of repositories in order to reproduce releases required by customers.
One possible improvement could be a `ham create-pinned-manifest` sub-command that generates such a manifest from your current state. That’s not trivial — it would require resolving different remotes and checking that all commits are actually reachable in one of the remotes — but it’s definitely doable. If you're interested, feel free to open a proposal or even an issue on the ham GitHub repository — we’d love to hear your thoughts or collaborate on a solution.
It is something I could consider working on, but it would be joining a long list of other tasks.
Would any of these ideas help in your workflow? Do you have something else in mind? We're always happy to improve L4Re together with the people who use it.
I think they would be helpful. Previously, with Subversion, one could request a given release and get a versioned distribution of the software. The disadvantages were the poor performance of Subversion and the awkwardness of managing independent changes, as we all know. But that simplicity was also very useful.
Thanks once again for following up and giving my concerns your consideration!
Paul
Message: 3 Date: Wed, 14 May 2025 16:04:06 +0000 From: Richard Clark richard.clark@Coheretechnology.us Subject: RE: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.) To: Marcus Hähnel support@kernkonzept.com, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk, "l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de" l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de Message-ID: <PH1P110MB17256A3F2418A9467AC57D79FC91A@PH1P110MB1725.NAM P110.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Marcus,
I, for one, rather than having to learn yet-another-tool that doesn't quite do what I want, would rather that you have a fully-blessed-and-tested release all rolled up in a tar (or zip) file for download. You could even have a git repo just for the tar files. One caveat, being that it must contain ALL the repos and possible little pieces that could possibly go with it. One thing I hate about git is sub-repos that get lost or are not pulled down and cause severe headaches trying to match versions. Like lwip, or virtio_switch, or any of the other couple dozen packages that don't get pulled down with the new ham build process. I'd like to be able to go to one place, use a command I already know, and get a fully functional, fully populated, "blessed" version. You do have your old downloads site with a tgz file, but even that doesn't contain all the packages any more. This is the frustrating part. I need a way to get a snapshot of everything that could possibly go together in a release whether I need it or not, because some day I will need it and then the version I need will no longer be available. So, not a "demo" or "example" version, but a full-source-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink version.
Thank you for considering our opinions!
Richard
-----Original Message----- From: Marcus Hähnel support@kernkonzept.com Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2025 10:53 AM To: Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk; l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de Subject: Re: Configuration, component and repository versioning (was Re: Upgrade issues. VM won't start.)
On Mon, 2025-05-12 at 22:37 +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:
On Monday, 12 May 2025 15:09:52 CEST Marcus Hähnel wrote:
On Mon, 2025-05-05 at 11:25 +0000, Richard Clark wrote:
But that brings me to a bigger question. How do I fetch only Long-Term-Support or Fully-Tested-and-Blessed versions? Github is woefully lacking in proper version support. I can't send random untested code to my customers.
All code we push to Github went through our internal QA process, running compile checks for all our supported architectures as well as an extensive test suite on different platforms and configurations. So from that point of view I would say you can consider all code pushed to Github as “Fully-Tested-and-Blessed”.
I don't have a strong opinion about quality assurance for people wanting to provide solutions for paying customers, but I have personally wondered how I might successfully and conveniently reproduce repository configurations when creating new L4Re development environments.
For example, if I decide to work on support for a new board, I might want to replicate the L4Re configuration I have been using for another board. Starting from scratch, it was possible to use the ham tool, but despite it apparently maintaining version details for the different repositories, it wasn't particularly clear how one might preserve or export that metadata for further use.
I now see that there is another tool involved:
https://l4re.org/getting_started/bob.html
Although that doesn't seem to replace the ham tool:
https://l4re.org/getting_started/make.html
Naturally, one might say that this is the point at which anyone serious-enough about using L4Re would get in touch with Kernkonzept and start talking business, but such a lack of clarity tends to suggest that either there aren't particularly adequate solutions for such fundamental needs or that any adequate solutions that may exist aren't for people merely investigating or evaluating the technology.
Again, it isn't my concern if there's a business decision involved that everybody feels comfortable with, and if there's a steady stream of interested customers that seems to justify such a decision, but I could easily see potential users going elsewhere if the answer to simple questions is "talk to us". Even in reasonably large organisations, hitting an approval barrier that "talk to us" or "register your interest" represents can be a strong disincentive, especially if other solutions exist.
I accept that my opinion isn't important, however, since my own activities are confined to my own interests and driven by a general belief that L4Re represents a reasonable foundation for certain kinds of systems. That there isn't exactly much of a public community around L4Re could also be regarded as a disincentive for potential adopters, which is unfortunate.
Paul
Hi Paul,
thank you very much for your thoughtful message — it's really appreciated.
First of all: your opinion absolutely matters. The input from users like you, who engage deeply and share candid feedback, helps us make L4Re better. While we are aware that L4Re is still quite niche and the community small, we want to support it as best we can and would love to see it grow.
I think you're raising a different, but equally important, point compared to what Richard was asking. My original response focused on the idea of providing a fully tested release for a specific combination of software configuration and hardware, which is understandably difficult for us to maintain as part of the open-source offering given our limited resources.
Your concern — about being able to reproduce a known working state of your development environment — is much more fundamental. You're right: this should be straightforward, and if it's not, then it's something we want to improve. Ease of use and accessibility are important to us, and sometimes we’re just too close to the system to see where friction arises — so thank you again for pointing this out.
To clarify one key point: we don’t deliberately withhold features or usability improvements from the open-source version of L4Re to push people into commercial contact. That’s not our business philosophy. In fact, that would go directly against our goal of getting L4Re into more hands and making it easier to work with.
Some of the convenience features — like release tagging — do exist in our customer repositories, but it’s more of a workflow habit than a conscious decision to exclude them from GitHub. No one had brought up the need for that kind of reproducibility in the open repo so far — and now that you have, let’s fix it.
Would something like weekly tags on GitHub help you? For example, a tag like `l4re-2025-05-14` that you could use with `ham checkout` to reproduce that specific state?
Also, ham already supports pinned revisions in the manifest (`revision` attribute in `project` tags), so you can share a complete and reproducible state that way as well. But I agree that this could be made more convenient.
One possible improvement could be a `ham create-pinned-manifest` sub-command that generates such a manifest from your current state. That’s not trivial — it would require resolving different remotes and checking that all commits are actually reachable in one of the remotes — but it’s definitely doable. If you're interested, feel free to open a proposal or even an issue on the ham GitHub repository — we’d love to hear your thoughts or collaborate on a solution.
Would any of these ideas help in your workflow? Do you have something else in mind? We're always happy to improve L4Re together with the people who use it.
Best regards,
- Marcus Hähnel Principal Engineering Lead
-- +++ Register now for our workshop “Get to know L4Re in 3 days” on +++ October 28–30. Learn to design and deploy secure system architectures for your product with L4Re: https://www.kernkonzept.com/workshop-getting-started-with-l4re/ +++
Kernkonzept GmbH Sitz: Dresden HRB 31129 Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Michael Hohmuth
l4-hackers mailing list -- l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de To unsubscribe send an email to l4-hackers-leave@os.inf.tu-dresden.de
Subject: Digest Footer
l4-hackers mailing list -- l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de To unsubscribe send an email to l4-hackers-leave@os.inf.tu-dresden.de
End of l4-hackers Digest, Vol 246, Issue 9