Writing device drivers for L4 (was Re: Hurd/Mach on L4)

[Michael Hohmuth]

Farid Hajji <address@hidden> writes in l4-hurd:

[...]
> The second pressing point is to write/port a very small subset of device
> drivers to L4. We need a native L4 driver for ATAPI (or SCSI?) disks,
> so that the pager can use a real disk as backing store, and so that
> we can port a filesystem as well ;). Here too, no-one volunteered yet.

We in Dresden have extensive experience in porting Linux device
drivers to run directly on top of L4, so if you guys have questions,
don't hesitate to ask on the L4-hackers mailing list
<address@hidden>.

Currently, some of my colleagues are working on a framework that
allows you to (more or less) drop a Linux driver in a preconfigured
source tree and get a working driver that runs on the x86 L4 kernels
(L4/x86, Fiasco, L4KA).  This framework, which will work with the
L4Env environment we're developing, is not quite ready yet, but it
might be worth the wait.

As an alternative, consider using the OSKit.  We have developed a
compatibility library that allows you to run applications using the
OSKit (including the OSKit's device drivers) on top of L4.  This work
is a bit unpolished and the drivers are slow, but it's quite easy to
use.  I even wrote a technical report on it:
<URL:http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~hohmuth/prj/oskit-l4.ps.gz>.

(You can find this and other reports in the L4 Developer's
bibliography at <URL:http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/bib.html>.)

Michael
-- 
address@hidden, address@hidden
http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/