Re: first experiences with l4ka on a real pentium

[Farid Hajji]

> > I didn't try anything else, because I was not able to compile 
> > Dresden's L4Linux on FreeBSD (I used l4ka.org's glinux binary).
> > At least the root_task seems to work and this is very good for now.
> > Based on root_task, L4 servers can be build, probably with flux' oskit
> > (which compiles w/o problems on FreeBSD too!). The we can start thinking
> > about libmom and porting the Hurd to L4Ka.
> > 
> Yes, this is excellent news.
> 
> But why do you feel the OsKit is necessary?  It seems that with a working
> L4KA it should be possible to follow the example of the hello-world template
> to produce servers of our own.  Or perhaps it's just easier with OsKit?
> I must admit I haven't taken the time to master that beast :)
Of course, the first servers would use the bare L4 IPC calls, but somewhere
down the road, you'll want to access a disk and here comes OsKit to your
help. The OsKit libraries provide plenty Linux and FreeBSD device drivers,
filesystems etc.. You don't have to maintain this widely known codebase,
as long as OsKit developers do it and the OSKit libraries are not restricted
for in-kernel use only. They are plain normal libs that you would link to
your L4-servers, overriding functions as necessary. It seems like a quick
way to put up an OS personality.

Porting the Hurd is something else. Here the libraries are already present
(glibc and all other hurdish libs.). Traditional gnumach includes some old
device drivers, but that is expected to improve with oskit-mach. Porting
would mean to add L4 sysdeps to glibc and to implement device drivers as
user-level tasks that _may_ include code from OsKit.

We could start this right now, but there's a drawback. Without a proper
abstraction layer between the Hurd components (mainly glibc) and the
microkernel, the same work would have to be repeated again for each other
microkernel as well. That was the reason I'm interested in libmom or
a replacement thereof.

Thanks,

-Farid.


-- 
Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Admin | Phone: +49-2131-67-555
Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany  | farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net
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