Exactly. I've spent years telling people about all these projects and activities under way. Thanks for the link to some I hadn't heard of. Microsoft's VerveOS was clever. Genode is most innovative & practical from L4 family. Separation kernels (eg INTEGRITY-178B, LynxSecure) lowered TCB on full virtualization (esp Windows). Minix 3 is nicely doing the self-healing thing. IBM's K42 pushed cluster schemes pretty hard. Oberon still gets developed (eg A2 Bluebottle) & Wirth recently put it on custom hardware (again). Also notable that Oberon OS has garbage collection. Azul's Vega processors basically make hardware, GC, and OS for Java apps. MirageOS making smaller, safer TCB on Xen using Ocaml.

And so on and so forth. Much stuff being done in directions that might actually achieve something. There's still hope for those of us wanting something other than monolithic garbage whose uptimes still can't beat a VMS cluster from the 80's and whose security is a measure of how convenient it is to hackers.

seL4 is great, but it's still an incremental evolution. L4 has been a research interest for a couple of decades now (some Japanese students even ported Plan 9 on top of L4), so something like a formally verified microkernel was long coming.

CheriBSD is more of a hardware research platform. We've had capability-based hardware and similar protection schemes for decades, but they never caught on.

Containers are an absolute disappointment the way they were popularized with Docker, and I think it's naive to assume that "microservices" are anything but a buzzword. The microservice architecture itself is exceptionally old and basically a reapplication of OO principles to high-level software components.

Unikernels and libOS are kind of interesting, though.

seL4 isn't supposed to be innovative: it's supposed to be verified correct to a higher level than EAL7. It seems to have succeeded. Go to Genode.org to see innovation in L4 space, theirs and others'.

I agree on containers and microservices. IT rarely learns the good lessons of the past but often repeats its failures. The first good containers were Burrough's apps where they compiled source against a good API with checks at interface level (compile-time & runtime) with full reuse of code in memory to avoid duplication. Hardware-enforced, optional isolation & duplication if you wanted a brick wall. That has both an efficiency and security argument. This new shit might be an improvement on typical Windows or UNIX/Linux deployment but seems to be improving in wrong direction.

Best example is still them standardizing on complicated HTTP- and XML-based middleware instead of simpler formats (eg s-expressions) with a grammar I can auto-generate w/ validation checks on TCP/UDP-based middleware which I can also auto-generate w/ validation checks. Designing robust, efficient solutions with mainstream stuff is like walking through a friggin' minefield of problems.... where it can even be done! Starting to think they're all closet masochists...