- Pose - lists.tockos.org

Action: Fill in PI-specific NSF Report Section
by Amit Levy 01 Aug '24

01 Aug '24

All, Please fill out the couple questions on the NSF report on this page: https://www.research.gov/rppr-web/rppr?execution=e1s32 They are things like number of months worked, contributions, other funding support for the project, etc. Also, answers to other questions consolidated in this Google Doc if you want to update/edit: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z56NjqRupN5-FD8rXE0p-K6OL30zi1vddIYyjjb… I think we're pretty good to go. We've done a lot!

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Agenda 05/31/24
by Amit Levy 31 May '24

31 May '24

Brief agenda for discussion today: * Hudson as PI at the Tock Foundation, so we can add it as a sub-grantee * Treadmill (the hardware CI) progress and plan * Hiring * Summer undergrads * Trademark applications * Tock vs TockOS vs Tock OS * Logo * Updates from Microsoft and Google Talk to you all soon! -Amit

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Can't meet today after all, family situation
by Amit Levy 26 Apr '24

26 Apr '24

Hi all, We were supposed to meet today instead of last week. I have an unexpected childcare + medical situation going on today, so I can't unfortunately. I'll send an update when I can and will try to reschedule since it would be really useful for me. Sorry, Amit

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Meeting 4/5/24
by Amit Levy 05 Apr '24

05 Apr '24

Hi All, We're planning on meeting today to discuss POSE updates. 1. April 5, 2024 - 4pm Eastern, 3pm Central, 1pm Pacific 3. https://meetings.dialpad.com/room/tock/5mvkj3spj1 Agenda: - Updates: - (Slow) fundraising: - Google - Microsoft, Pluton - Microsoft, Caliptra - HPE - zeroRISC - Legal update - Hiring updates - Hardware CI progress (on hold for SOSP deadlines) - Discuss: - Governance model: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rx2YLJ_yRIlReuodwoIq0bf2cWmkkpNJj3SVU3O… - More TBD - Amit

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Caliptra
by Philip Levis 20 Mar '24

20 Mar '24

I talked with Vishal Soni and Bryan Kelly from Azure/Caliptra. They are interested in learning more. Caliptra doesn’t have an OS and they will want one. They are positive on Rust. Vishal asked if he could meet with some of us for some technical discussions. I told them that our end goal is if Azure helped support the Tock Foundation, but we realize that’s a long way off and let’s first see if it would be a good fit for their needs. Bryan brought up an interesting point, which is patent trolls. It’s why their foundational security work is grounded in the Chips Alliance, which is under the Linux Foundation. Basically, nobody is going to sue the Linux Foundation. He said that they would be worried about whether patent trolls would come after Microsoft after they have incorporated Tock. Who would like to participate in a call with Vishal? It sounds like he’d already read a bit about Tock, and saw some ways that they might need changes (e.g., having multiple implementations of crypto primitives being exposed to user space). Phil

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Legal & Fundraising Updates
by Amit Levy 13 Mar '24

13 Mar '24

Updates from foundation-building... On the legal front, we're getting bylaws worked out on the back-burner, but by the end of this month. We're also going to start with filing for 501c3 status, hope for the best, and fall back to something else if (like trying again or 501c6) if that's rejected. It seems plausible and doesn't really risk anything significant. On the fundraising front... I've sent Microsoft, Google, HPE, Western Digital, OxidOS and zeroRISC the attached membership prospectus and gift agreement. These are meant as "starting bids" and I don't really expect anyone to sign the gift agreement as is. So far, there is a back-channel response from Google (through their lawyer and our lawyer) asking for some structure in the foundation that would provide more specific technical decision making---"durable technical decision making." We took that that to mean that something like a Technical Advisory Board, composed of foundation members, which has regular interaction with the Core WG, though doesn't actually have oversight, might be what would satisfy them. I still need to actually talk to Cyrus synchronously (probably Friday or early next week), but I proposed something like this via e-mail ("I wonder what you think about doing something like this?"). The main contact at Microsoft, Nazmus Sakib, is about to go on parental leave. He hasn't taken a close look yet, but because of that I'm trying to get him to connect us to someone else who can make decisions (probably at their Open Source Programs Office). If we make progress with Google on a structure for membership, I'll update/propose the same thing to Microsoft, and the hope is that that one brings along the other. HPE is moving up the chain, since the only people we know there don't have decision making power. I'm going to visit them in-person the week after next, which will be an opportunity to pursue that. Alistair is our only contact at Western Digital really, was luke warm about WD's ability to participate last I talked to him, and has yet to respond to my e-mail. OxidOS (Alex) and zeroRISC (Dom) both want in, but OxidOS would need a way lower tier than Google/Microsoft, so that probably need to wait until we have a sense of what Tiers mean, and zeroRISC is at least a few weeks too early until they close their series A. -Amit

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Tock-POSE Meeting Today (4pm/3pm/1pm)
by Brad Campbell 06 Mar '24

06 Mar '24

Hi All, We're planning on meeting today to discuss POSE updates. This was opportunistically scheduled so no worries if you can't make it. 1. Mar 6, 2024 - 4pm Eastern, 3pm Central, 1pm Pacific 2. https://meetings.dialpad.com/room/aalevy Agenda: - Debrief from I-Corp - Updates on hiring hardware testing engineer - Updates on TockWorld7 planning - Speakers - Venue/logistics - Updates on foundation planning - Project stewardship and governance - Status of tutorials/outreach - Tutorial descriptions - Documentation and onboarding - Hardware - Looking ahead - Hiring community organizer position - Other new business - Brad

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Theodore L Siu Interview Notes
by Amit Levy 19 Jan '24

19 Jan '24

*** Theodore L Siu <2024-01-19 Fri 14:30> **** What is your experience with: ***** Low-resource microcontrollers or other hardware facing development? - Majority of relevant experience was working on Fuschia - Users were basically Nest developers - CLI tools that handled different development aspects - Setting up environment for remote development - Software delivery side of the OS --- how can a Nest developer go from a change in the monorepo to actually running on the device - CLI tool for flashing ***** Rust - Wanted to learn Rust, so joined Fuschia really _for_ Rust - Current job is in Rust ***** Automated testing and continuous integration - Touched CI throughout career working with data - No testing involved physical hardware - E.g., Fuschia had an emulator - Extensive experience with automated testing in general, both at Google and in data roles ***** Secure system design - Feel pretty comfortable with Rust, but not as comfortable in lower-level "stuff" - With data space worked with people who use PII data, used crypto shredding - Amit's note: no real "experience," but exhibited a bunch of familiarity with some tools/ideas and knew what he was talking about - Recently implemented **** What is your experience with community-based open source projects? - A lot of experience - Contributed to ~10 open source projects - Apache Airflow - Beam - Mostly for data processing stuff - Model: read the docs, this is what is required for each PR, maybe open an issue, squash commits **** Tell me about a scenario where you worked in a multi-stakeholder setting? E.g. one where different contributors had different incentives and resources? Or, what strengths do you bring to this environment and what challenges might you face? - At Google: professional services organization, lots of stakeholders with different incentives & goals - Nest developers that join Fuschia - Wrote a one pager on issues with dev setup, add some education within tools - Started larger conversation about backwards compatibility **** Give an example of a significant project that you completed independently? **** When is a project "done"? - A checklist of deliverables - E.g. "Hey, will you take this over?", "Yeah, once it does X, Y, Z" **** Do you have experience working with remote collaborators? - Very comfortable **** How often do you prefer to check-in with stakeholders on your project? - Prefer to give folks space, meet every 3 or 4 days - Both synchronous and synchornous - Problem with async is that it gives people room to disappear **** What is your preferred mode of working in a group? - Something in between weekly check-in, maybe doing programming together, etc **** What challenges do you foresee on-boarding to working on Tock in this role?

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New user conversation updates
by amit＠amitlevy.com 13 Dec '23

13 Dec '23

I had a chance over the past couple weeks to speak with Lawrence Esswood on the Pixel team at Google and with Tony Chen & Nasmus Sakib on the Pluton team at Microsoft about their use of Tock. I'm planning to follow up with both after the holidays. With Lawrence there is some specific follow ups related to memory tagging, but also to keep the conversation going. With Tony & Nasmus, we'll set up additional conversations with some of the developers who have some feedback and thoughts, particuarly on libtock-c. # Some high-level common points 1. Both groups have been using Tock for a while (at least a year in both cases) and both did a fairly broad survey to decide what to use. 2. Both are not yet shipping products, but both are on the path to shipping Tock in their products 3. Both are basically targeting secure elements within a larger SoC 4. Both are working with tagged memory, which is cool. # Lawrence @ Pixel Background: Lawrence was a PhD student of Robert Watson's at Cambridge working on CHERI. He's been at Google for a bit more than a year working on the (future) secure element for Pixel. * They have a separate fork of Tock than Ti50. Two promising and noteworthy differences: * They have already done a rebase to upgrade to Tock 2.0, meaning they've already experienced the downside of forking and seemed to have weathered OK. * They have particular and very interesting things in the plan to contribute upstream now that they have more cycles (basically the team is growing). One is support for 64-bit platforms, another is zero-copy I/O. Lawrence already had a very good handle on the trade-off involved and was very prepared to both defend the choices, how to limit impact on non-users, and also prepared to be convinced of different designs or that it may not make sense upstream (I was convinced that in some form both of these make sese) * Their use case is very similar to what we envisioned Tock being particularly good for. * They are/will be a team of people working on the kernel and a _separate_ team of "developers" building applications. All from Google, but nonetheless different * Code size is a non-issue for them. Everything is in SRAM, but they have between 1MB-10MB of SRAM and it's just not something they've run into at all so far. # Pluton * Pluton is basically a general hardware component they are expecting to have on all Windows PCs/laptops/whatever baked into the SoC from a variety of vendors starting pretty soon * So this is another microcontroller-on-die-with-a-CPU * They chose and are basically sticking with Tock * Tony Chen (the main guy: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/tonychen/) said he wasn't sure if there is hardware shipping yet, but said there will be at some point, presumably in the not so far future, but idk * For them, future applications will be written in Rust, but they have a bunch of existing applications that are in C * They are using libtock-c and they have feedback/suggestions/requests (one of the people in the meeting was IMing with some of the devlopers who told confirmed, so we'll maybe here more) * Pluton doesn't necessarily have CHERI, but likely will have capabilities hardware (it's going to be a vendor-specific choice). They are probably going to replace MPU/PMP with capabilities where they can. * Evolution was very much: we had a home-baked non-OS from the xbox days, it slowly evolved to be more and more complex, we surveyed for what kind of more "real" OS made sense, and Tock makes the most sense.

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No meeting today in favor of NSF Kick-off meeting
by amit＠amitlevy.com 13 Dec '23

13 Dec '23

Sorry for the late notice, but today's meeting overlaps with a mandatory NSF POSE kick-off meeting which Branden and I will be attending. Everyone else is welcome, but not required to attend. Details: Wednesday, 12/13/2023 Time: 1:00-2:30 ET Zoom Link: https://venturewell.zoom.us/j/94152377487?pwd=cGxzbGJtczhEODJZQVdKSjJpNEc5d… Meeting ID: 941 5237 7487 Passcode: 77807699 -Amit

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