Boot2Java - a system for Java-based network appliances Mar 27, 2019

With Boot2Java, we present a Genode-based operating system that boots directly into a Java network application.

Embedded systems - in particular in the world of Internet of Things (IoT) - call for specially tailored and hardened appliance-like operating systems. The business logic of such systems is usually defined by experts in their product domain, and expressed in productivity languages, in particular Java. However, such domain experts are rarely operating-system specialists. Hence, IoT products often rely on off-the-shelf or vendor-provided variants of GNU/Linux or Android-based distributions and host higher-level language runtimes on top. The price for the quick time to market is the enormous complexity of the hardly-understood base system and the implicit dependency from regular software updates provided by the used OS vendor or distribution.

With our new exemplary Boot2Java system, we offer the prospect to break free from such dependencies and risks. This Genode-based system boots directly into our version of the OpenJDK Java runtime to execute a Java network application. The application can communicate over one or more network interfaces with the outside world. The underlying Genode-based operating system is three orders of magnitude less complex compared to the current state-of-the-art solutions. This is good because with less complexity, less things can go wrong.

The best part is that the system can be customized without diving deep into operating-system details. Changes like replacing the Java application, defining the network policy, or supplying a custom SSL certificate can be done directly on the boot medium (usually an SD card) without any further integration work.