64-bit Intel support

[alexanderkjeldaas]

I noticed that the KE95 summer projects, 12/2010 – 2/2011 was about porting seL4 to 64-bit Intel.

http://ertos.nicta.com/education/summer.pml

I'm filing this issue to get some documentation/feedback on what happened and possibly feasability or plans for this.

[lsf37]

The question would be well suited for the sel4-devel mailing list, there would probably be interest in that topic.

The summer project did happen and there exists a very experimental old x86_64 version of seL4 as a proof of concept, but it has way too many issues to be usable at this point and basically hasn't been maintained since then, so a fair amount of bitrot would be expected.

I will have to check back with the kernel dev team, but my memory of the conclusion is that it worked, and that a full version would be feasible but invasive to do. Ideally a new platform port would have no or very minimal impact on the verification of the ARM version, but this one would either have to sprinkle a large amount of ifdefs over the code everywhere or would need some refactoring that would be visible to the other platforms (incl verified) because it has to change the width of some fundamental data types that are used in the platform-independent part of the kernel (which basically means that this generic part is not as generic as we would like). This is not that big of a deal, but it means a larger amount of work than other platform ports.

If you'd be interested in working on this, definitely let us know!

[lsf37]

It looks like this issue can be closed.

Just for posterity, adding the link to the mailing list which is the best place for questions: https://sel4.systems/lists/listinfo/