Release Process

This page outlines how we make seL4 and its associated ecosystem available to external developers. The goals of this process are as follows:

  • provide a current up to date version of our libraries and applications,
  • allow developers to decide when to upgrade between versions, i.e choose when breakage happens,
  • and provide libraries and apps compatible with each released version.

Currently, we do not guarantee maintenance of previous releases, or individually version libraries, projects and applications.

Terminology

  • Sources: source code for everything
  • Kernel: the seL4 microkernel source repository
  • Libraries: user level libraries that run on seL4
  • Applications: applications that run on seL4
  • Projects: a collection of applications, libraries, kernel, denoted by a repo manifest
  • CAmkES: the CAmkES tool repository
  • Proofs: the formal proofs about seL4 in the l4v repository.

Sources

We make a lot of source code available in the spirit of open source, however we do not guarantee that all source provided is maintained and tested.

A list of maintained projects, libraries and applications can be found here.

Releases

We have two release channels:

  • Bleeding edge: These happen whenever any of our maintained project code is updated and the tests for it are passing
  • Versioned releases: Versioned releases of the kernel and the CAmkES tool. These happen less frequently.

Bleeding edge releases happen every time the code is updated and it passes the test suites and proofs. Working on the bleeding edge means that API changes occur often, and you may get cut. Whenever any of the sources tracked by the manifests in the following repositories are updated and the regression tests pass, an updated version of the corresponding default.xml manifest will automatically be committed to the repo indicating which version combination is confirmed to work.

Which release should you use?

We recommend you develop on a specific version of the kernel, rather than the bleeding edge which is the tip of master. Each MAJOR.MINOR release has release notes which describe changes and specific upgrade notes, posted here.

New features and bug fixes will appear in bleeding edge updates earlier than in a released version. If you are working on a long-term project on seL4 or are using a different user level than we provide then it is probably better to pick a versioned release and manually upgrade when new features are required. We only guarantee working proofs for released versions, although we try to maintain working proofs for bleeding edge releases as well. If you are trying out seL4 and experimenting with different features, rerunning benchmarks or doing the tutorials, using the bleeding edge versions of the projects is probably fine. They don’t get updated unless they are passing our tests and any issues should be reported to the relevant GitHub issue tracker or posted on the mailing list or discourse.

Version Numbers

For versioned releases, seL4 and CAmkES/capDL have different policies.

seL4 follows semantic versioning. In short:

“Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  • MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
  • MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
  • PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.”

seL4 versions are tagged in git.

CAmkES and capDL versions follow the following policy:

MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH:

  • MAJOR: A big rewrite
  • MINOR: The actual release number, increased when seL4 is released or there are source/binary incompatible CAmkES updates
  • PATCH: Small bug fixes that are backwards compatible.

Library Compatibility

seL4 libraries have branches that track all MAJOR.MINOR versions, with branch names in the format MAJOR.MINOR-compatible. A MAJOR.MINOR-compatible branch will build with any MAJOR.MINOR.* version of the kernel, and all MAJOR.MINOR-compatible branches across our libraries are compatible with each other.

Legacy support

We only currently provide bug fixes and support for the latest version of the kernel and latest version of libraries.

Manifests

Each project repository above contains several manifest files:

  • default.xml specifies pinned revisions of the source that are updated every time a new bleeding edge release is pushed. These manifests should always compile and pass tests if the correct build configurations are used.
  • master.xml specifies the tip of each repository in a project. These aren’t guaranteed to work, and may contain combinations of repositories that have not been tested together.

default.xml is tagged at each released version. To obtain the manifest for a specific kernel version checkout the corresponding X.Y.z tag. Our previous process created an X.Y.z.xml manifest for each release, but this is no longer the case.

Proofs/Verification manifests

The verification-manifest project contains a ${SEL4_VERSION}.xml containing revisions which correspond to a version of the proofs that pass for the released version of the kernel

Versioned manifests

The following projects manifest repositories are maintained, meaning both bleeding edge and versioned releases are available:

Release procedure

This section describes how a release is done, and is mostly a checklist for the person performing a versioned release.

Release window and freeze

When a release is planned, decide on the timeframe of the release window in which changes can still be made, and then make an announcement to the relevant channels that a release is coming up and let people know of the release window that you have decided. This is to give advance notice to contributors so that they can prepare for the release and get features merged in before the release is done. A decent timeframe for the release window is a month.

The relevant channels for the announcement are:

Upon the end of the release window, announce the close of the window and the start of the release freeze on the relevant channels. Pull requests should not be merged during the release freeze except for those that fix issues and bugs that occurred during the release window. Work towards getting the continuous integration builds to be green while working on the next step.

Preparing changelogs

Before preparing the changelogs for each project, review the changes of each project since the last release and decide a new version number as according to the Version Numbers section.

Clone the seL4_release repository from the seL4 organisation (this is currently private and you will need to ask for access).

Move to the directory of the repository that you cloned and execute the following while replacing the fields:

./releaseit prerelease --config data/sel4_prerelease.yml --new-version=<new seL4 version>

./releaseit prerelease --config data/capdl_prerelease.yml --new-version=<new capDL version> --sel4-version=<new seL4 version>

./releaseit prerelease --config data/camkes_prerelease.yml --new-version=camkes-<new CAmkES version> --sel4-version=<new seL4 version>

These commands clone the projects in the /tmp directory of your machine and apply two commits that add changes to the CHANGES and VERSION files. Note that it also creates a <project>_release.md file in each project directory. You now need to add any extra changes since the last release that were not already included in the CHANGES file for each project. To do so, run git log with the relevant arguments to get the commits since the last release or go to each project’s GitHub page and filter the pull requests that were merged since the last release. Go through each of the commits/pull requests and summarise them in the CHANGES files. You do not need to add changes that are trivial. The best way to think about this is: “If I’m a user of (seL4, CAmkES, capDL) will it affect me? Do I need to know about it, e.g has the API changed? Are variables renamed? New features? New licences? Removal of features?” etc. Make sure to also update the Upgrade Notes section in each CHANGES file.

Meanwhile, you can also work on making sure the continuous integration builds are green while preparing the changelogs. Remember to also include any fixes and changes from this process to the changelogs.

Verification

Coordinate with the verification team to make a simultaneous release of the verification repositories. If the proof builds are green, this should be a relatively short process. If the proof builds are not green, the release must wait until those are fixed.

Release

Once the continuous integration builds are all green (make sure that the verification builds are also green) and the changelogs are also done, amend the commits that the release tool made with the updated CHANGES file in each project, sign the commits off and submit pull requests for each project. Make sure that the pull request only contains the two commits, one for updating the VERSION and the CHANGES files to the latest version and one for updating the VERSION file to add the dev suffix to the contents.

The next step is to copy the contents of each project’s CHANGES file to the <project>_release.md file in the same directory. Make sure that the top of the <project>_release.md file contains a project: sel4, project: camkes, or project: capdl tag. Take all of the <project>_release.md files and rename them to the current release version and add them under the _releases folder in the docsite’s repository here. Submit a pull request for those changes as well.

Get all pull requests (should be four, one for each project, and one for the docsite) merged and then wait for GitHub to release the version tags for each project. Once this is done, we can now carry out the last remaining tasks and announce the release.

Post release

Update the links on the docsite to point to the new releases by updating the version numbers in this file.

Announce on the mailing list as well as the seL4 Discourse that the new release is done. Update the line in this file to point to the seL4 Discourse announcement.

Build a new version of the seL4 kernel manual and add it here and update the symlink to point to it.

Finally, go to the release tool and run the following command while replacing the fields:

./releaseit postrelease --sel4-new-version=<new seL4 version> --camkes-new-version=<new CAmkES version> --capdl-new-version=<new capDL version>

This command will add version tags to each sub-project repository for each of the repositories that are under those projects. Running it without the --release flag will perform a dry-run. If there are issues during the dry-run, fix them up and when everything is all good, run it with the --release flag.

Now, the final task to do it to go to the GitHub pages for the seL4, CAmkES, and capDL projects and draft new GitHub releases for each of the projects.

Once you’re here, hurray the release is done!