Computer Science and Engineering
seL4 is a microkernel, meaning that all device drivers are user-level programs, as are network protocol stacks and file systems. Low-level systems programming such as device driver development is tedious and error-prone.
Pancake is a research programming language currently under development at Chalmers University of Technology, ANU, and UNSW. It comes with a formally verified compiler and is built from the ground up for predictable compilation and ease of verification.
When writing drivers in the seL4 device driver framework, the need sometimes arises to suspend an action and complete it later. For this, native language support for a continuation-like mechanism would be handy. This project is to extend the Pancake language with such a feature.
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Research Area
Operating systems | Programming languages
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- Expected Outcomes
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The Trustworthy Systems (TS) Group is the pioneer in formal (mathematical) correctness and security proofs of computer systems software. Its formally verified seL4 microkernel, now backed by the seL4 Foundation, is deployed in real-world systems ranging from defence systems via medical devices, autonomous cars to critical infrastructure. The group's vision is to make verified software the standard for security- and safety-critical systems. Core to this a focus on performance as well as making software verification more scalable and less expensive.
- Report outlining the approach taken, tradeoffs considered and work done.
- HOL4 formalisations of a draft syntax and semantics for the new feature, and as a stretch goal, its compilation and correctness proof.
