Embedded system development is a complex area in which the developers need to have a deep understanding of the underlying hardware with its configurations and interfaces, and one of the solutions to reduce this complexity is to utilize an operating system. This talk will introduce F9 microkernel aimed at low resources embedded systems powered by ARM Cortex-M microprocessors, allowing to perform real-time activities while keeping the drivers and the application isolated by a secure layer.

F9 microkernel proved itself extremely small and simple to use while still maintaining the security of the system regarding the temporal constraints with a trusted computing base (TCB) as small as 3kLoC, which is important for safety, security and reliability in mission-critical embedded systems. This talk will also present the prototype at its early stages built to experiment with the idea of third-generation microkernels heavily inspired by seL4 for resource-constrained devices with fairly strong memory protection.