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I’m a fan of microkernel hosts for guest monoliths, thus our servers are running seL4 as safety layer and backups for FreeBSD VMs with jails for renderfarm, BEAM clusters and Jenkins.

All I’m missing is an ARM port of DragonflyBSD for its threading and in-process kernels (hybrid kernel design). My dream is to run it on 128 cores Ampere Altra to run OpenMoonRay more effectively.



Could you elaborate on how your servers use seL4? And are these production, commercial servers?


Yes, commercial production servers. Similar to some other systems and certain consoles, microkernel is used as hypervisor that protect bare metal hardware from potential hazards when guest monoliths like mentioned FreeBSD becomes compromised. Guest components are running our software and services inside jails on two 128 core, two 64 core and one 32 core Ampere processors where first two machines run heavy workloads like offline rendering and Erlang VM clusters, while others are used to provide a few VPS servers, and internal services.


I thought support for multi-core was still lagging? Or are you just running the unverified version?


Thanks. That's similar to prior uses. Makes sense.

I think some readers next question might be: are you all hiring?


We're not hiring at the moment.


IMO, you would be crazy to pass up nickp as an employee.


Heh, I’d love to, but we’re small Scandinavian business with not enough revenue to cover salary of such person yet (2-3m isk/mo).


Thank you anyway.


Sounds like your setup would make for an interesting read in longer form




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