Over 20 years ago I was merely being interested in administrating a traditional UNIX server, offered by Prof. Hermann Härtig in the basic operating system’s lecture. I surely didn’t plan on becoming CTO of a renowned company doing microkernel-based operating systems. Yet this is what I have been doing for 10 years now: With Kernkonzept we bring state-of-the-art operating system technology out into the world and lift the bar for system security in a variety of applications.
Even while I was still visiting school I went to university whenever possible (big thanks to the “Schülerrechenzentrum” that connects school and university studies). I explored this new Internet thing using the available UNIX machines. This brought me to Linux quickly. I was allowed to bring my own 386DX40 machine to the university lab and connect it to the Internet via a DEPCA network card – that was around 1996!
My career seemed clear to me: After the mandatory time of serving my country I went straight back to university, where I could administrate a UNIX server which had been donated by IBM. The operating systems group at university was committed to #L4 microkernels which intrigued me. We were figuring out how to build a common infrastructure on an L4 microkernel to actually allow building applications on top of it, called L4Env.
On this I based my thesis about making L4Linux running on this infrastructure, allowing to run multiple instances of L4Linux at the same time, which had not been possible before. Nowadays this is a commodity called VM. Back then we did not even call it virtualization, and no processor had any feature to support it. This virtualization approach has been accompanying us until today.
Exploring aspects of the operating system design space eventually led us the to the L4Re system we are now using. On that I wrote an even bigger thesis about the real-time option within virtualized systems in a secure manner.
Eventually we accepted the challenge to build a secure smartphone that could run two VMs side by side, with the extra requirement to develop an organizational framework. This phone was then a technological masterpiece, and it led to the foundation of Kernkonzept over 10 years ago.
We have moved on to build Kernkonzept as it is now: leading in building secure systems for security-critical applications and the automotive market and tapping into new industries and markets that can benefit from our state-of-the-art open source operating system framework.
