l4-hackers March 1999

l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de

8 participants
15 discussions

Re: using L4-Linux
by Michael Hohmuth 01 Apr '99

01 Apr '99

edmundo(a)rano.demon.co.uk writes: > I had it sort of running just now ... > [...] > I then had no cursor, but a shell, with which I could walk around the > file system using pwd, cd and echo *. It reboots as soon as I do > anything that involves a fork, such as ls, cat or sh. So I'll worry > about configuring X later, right? :-) > I built main and sigma0 myself under Debian 2.1, i.e. gcc 2.7.2.3 and > binutils 2.9.1.0.19a, from the sources dated 981207. Everything else > was already on grub-ext2fs-floppy from the ftp site. I compile on a > 686 machine and run Fiasco on a 486 machine. I have tried the boot floppy you sent me, and I was able to boot L4Linux into multiuser mode. However, I had to replace "glinux.gz" with my own, self-compiled L4Linux server image because the one on the boot floppy didn't contain drivers for my SCSI card. One thing you might want to try is booting a newer L4Linux binary (the one one your floppy is pretty old). I'll send you mine under separate cover. If this also doesn't work, I guess that Fiasco has a problem with 486s. Right now I cannot test this because I currently don't have a working 486, but I probably will get one the week after the next. Michael PS: I have uploaded a new grub-ext2fs-floppy.gz which contains the newest version of all binaries, including Fiasco and working configuration files. It's at <URL:ftp://ftp.inf.tu-dresden.de/pub/os/L4/devel/grub-ext2fs-floppy.gz>. -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)sax.de http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/

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Fiasco/OSKit-0.96 patch (was Re: "relocation truncated")
by Michael Hohmuth 27 Mar '99

27 Mar '99

OKUJI Yoshinori <okuji(a)kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes: > Thanks for your answer. Could you show the patch you made for newer > OSKit? I'd like to see what changes are needed for different version > of OSKit. I'll append the patch below. You should only use it for informational purposes, and you shouldn't try actually applying it (I pretty sure it doesn't apply cleanly). This patch really only is a quick hack. There are many modifications involving changes to type names and include file names. Fiasco probably should be fixed not to rely on OSKit's type names so religiously. Michael -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)sax.de http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/

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None
by Robert Kaiser 24 Mar '99

24 Mar '99

Hello Hackers, this might be slightly offtopic, but... I see the rmgr man-page mentions a document titled "Guidelines for implementing os servers on top of L4". Is this document available on the Web ? If so, where can I download it ? Thanks in advance Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Kaiser email: rkaiser(a)sysgo.de SYSGO RTS GmbH Carl-Zeiss-Str. 41 phone: (49) 6131 9138-80 D-55129 Mainz / Germany fax: (49) 6131 9138-10

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None
by Cervino Ulises 18 Mar '99

18 Mar '99

> Hello, im a student of comp. science in Argentina, and for my final projects > i intend to develop an OS over fiasco, so far all ive been doing is reading > about L4 and testing some things with fiasco, if someone is interested or > did something with fiasco (coded any servers or anything) id love to know. > > Thanks !!

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Re: using L4-Linux
by Michael Hohmuth 17 Mar '99

17 Mar '99

edmundo(a)rano.demon.co.uk writes: > The nearest I've got to running L4-Linux so far, apparently, was by > dd-ing grub-ext2fs-floppy onto a floppy, adding "main" and "sigma0", > which I compiled myself, then booting with the following menu.lst: > > title = Linux > kernel=(fd0)/rmgr -nopentium -sigma0 > module=(fd0)/main -nokdb > module=(fd0)/sigma0 > module=(fd0)/glinux.gz root=/dev/hda2 > > The first error that I get is: > > RMGR: ERROR: while parsing config file: syntax error > at line 1, col 2 > > Does this matter? I don't know which config file it's talking about. > There's a rmgr.cfg.linux on the floppy, but I'm not booting with it, > because it made things worse when I tried using it. When you don't use a config file, Rmgr parses its command line for configuration info. Usually it skips over options starting with "-", but maybe the boot floppy contains an old Rmgr binary which doesn't. Copying a new binary (which you should find at l4/server/rmgr/src/rmgr) to the floppy should fix this problem. > At "RMGR: WARNING: there were 1 boot errors - continue?" I press > return ... > > Then I get a mixture of kernel start-up messages and L4 errors which > move too quickly for me to note them exactly. There are several > screens full of "sigma0 denies mapping", and there's a "Hmm, strange, > that shouldn't happen any more", These messages have no meaning, and they will be removed. Ignore them. ;) > and the last kernel message, before the machine reboots by itself, > is "INIT: version 2.75 booting". All quotations may be approximate. Hmm... a little bit of debugging would maybe help. Do you have a second machine available which you could connect to the first one using a null-modem cable? > I just tried it again, for about the fifth time, and it didn't get as > far this time. This time its last words were: > > Partition check: > hda: hda1 hda2 > VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. > wake_up_process: ipc failed > wake_up_process: ipc failed > wake_up_process: ipc failed > ... > wake_up_process: ipc failed These messages are also mostly informational. > Can anyone suggest what I can try next? Does anyone have this working? Well, we have... I suggest that you copy an image of your floppy using `dd' and send it to me; maybe I have overlooked something in the distribution. > I'm using the files dated 981207 and it's a 486 machine that I'm > using. (The other machines that I tried grind to a halt very early on > with "space.cc:179: failed assertion `size == PAGE_SIZE'".) This rings a familiar bell; I thought I had fixed this before -- I'll check tomorrow. > Does someone have working binaries of "main" and "sigma0" that I could > try, to see if there's something strange about my hardware? I don't think it's your hardware; it's just that we always test using Pentiums, and on i486s Fiasco cannot use 4-MB pages which may trigger a few bugs. We'll find them. ;) Michael -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)sax.de http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/

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l4-hackers: new mailing-list policy
by Michael Hohmuth 17 Mar '99

17 Mar '99

Since a few days, the mailing list manager for l4-hackers only accepts messages sent by list members. This policy has been implemented to reduce the amount of spam. Until a few minutes ago, messages sent by non-members disappeared into a black hole. I just got bitten by this myself because my subscription address used to be different from my sender address. We have changed this now so that illegitimate senders get a bounce message. I will re-send a few of my messages which vanished into the black hole later today. Michael -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)inf.tu-dresden.de http://home.pages.de/~hohmuth/

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Re: "relocation truncated"
by Michael Hohmuth 17 Mar '99

17 Mar '99

OKUJI Yoshinori <okuji(a)kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes: > From: edmundo(a)rano.demon.co.uk > Subject: "relocation truncated" > Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 12:48:47 +0000 > > > Does anyone with knowledge of x86 assembler understand this problem, > > and can they fix it? > > l4-oskit is rather old version of OSKit, and more recent version can > be compiled without such a error. I haven't compiled Fiasco with > oskit-0.97, but that will be fine, perhaps. The latest version is > available from the home page of the Flux Research Group, > http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flexmach/. There are a few changes necessary to compile Fiasco with the new OSKit. I have already done these changes once in a quick-and-dirty fashion, but I haven't merged them into the main trunk yet (and haven't updated them lately) because we haven't decided yet how and when we switch all our other DROPS components over to the new OSKit. Also, the new OSKit is so large that distributing a modified version of it is inconvenient; that's why we have to make sure that the latest official version fits our needs. Michael -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)sax.de http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/

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Re: 486/Pentium version problems
by Michael Hohmuth 17 Mar '99

17 Mar '99

Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo(a)rano.demon.co.uk> writes: > Following the instructions at os.inf.tu-dresden.de/fiasco/use.html I > built Fiasco and the Hello World server worked. Excellent! Cool! > Then I tried building L4-Linux and it didn't work ... > > Then I noticed that grub-ext2fs-floppy apparently already contains > everything you need to run L4-Linux except for L4 itself. So I just > copied the fiasco "main" that I had built onto the floppy image as > supplied, hacked menu.lst a bit at random, and tried that. > > That didn't work either, but the thing that caught my attention was a > message something like this: > > RMGR: L4/Pentium ... > > I was running this on a 486. This is a misleading message that should be fixed. It only means that Rmgr is not running on L4/486, and that it *will* try to request 4-MB pages from its Sigma0 memory server. Can you give us a hint on what exectly went wrong, or where the system hung? > So my questions are: > > Do the same executables (main, rmgr, sigma0, glinux.gz) run on both 486 > and Pentium, or do different versions have to be built? They should run on both architectures. However, I haven't tested Fiasco (main) a lot on 486s, so there may be minor problems. The other programs have been tested on both Pentiums and 486s. Regards, Michael -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)sax.de http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/

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Re: implementations of L4
by Michael Hohmuth 17 Mar '99

17 Mar '99

Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo(a)rano.demon.co.uk> writes: > I've been trying to find out about existing implementations of L4. > Perhaps people could correct or add to what I have discovered: > > * The original L4 by Jochen Liedtke. Written in assebler. For i486 and > i586. NOT FREE and therefore utterly useless :-) > > * L4/MIPS from Australia. Written in assembler? GNU. > > * L4/Alpha from Dresden and Australia. Written in assembler? Not yet > released but probably GNU? > > * Fiasco from Dresden. Written in C++, and designed for portabilty > rather than efficiency, but only runs on i486 and i586 at present. GNU. Fiasco hasn't really been designed for portability, even though it might serve as a model for future implementations (if someone would clean it up a bit ;). The reason it has been implemented in a high-level language is that this improves its maintainability. > * A version of L4 for x86 from Dresden written in C. I saw this > mentioned in the list archive. Is it really separate from Fiasco? No. There is no such beast. > * L4/ARM in assembler. Unfinished? I saw this in the archive, too. > > If this list could be corrected and completed, could it be put on the > L4 website, with links, as it must be what a lot of casual readers are > interested in knowing? Yes, that's right. The L4 web site at <URL:http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/> needs a major overhaul. Thanks for your suggestion. Michael -- hohmuth(a)innocent.com, hohmuth(a)sax.de http://www.sax.de/~hohmuth/

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using L4-Linux
by edmundo＠rano.demon.co.uk 15 Mar '99

15 Mar '99

The nearest I've got to running L4-Linux so far, apparently, was by dd-ing grub-ext2fs-floppy onto a floppy, adding "main" and "sigma0", which I compiled myself, then booting with the following menu.lst: title = Linux kernel=(fd0)/rmgr -nopentium -sigma0 module=(fd0)/main -nokdb module=(fd0)/sigma0 module=(fd0)/glinux.gz root=/dev/hda2 The first error that I get is: RMGR: ERROR: while parsing config file: syntax error at line 1, col 2 Does this matter? I don't know which config file it's talking about. There's a rmgr.cfg.linux on the floppy, but I'm not booting with it, because it made things worse when I tried using it. At "RMGR: WARNING: there were 1 boot errors - continue?" I press return ... Then I get a mixture of kernel start-up messages and L4 errors which move too quickly for me to note them exactly. There are several screens full of "sigma0 denies mapping", and there's a "Hmm, strange, that shouldn't happen any more", and the last kernel message, before the machine reboots by itself, is "INIT: version 2.75 booting". All quotations may be approximate. I just tried it again, for about the fifth time, and it didn't get as far this time. This time its last words were: Partition check: hda: hda1 hda2 VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. wake_up_process: ipc failed wake_up_process: ipc failed wake_up_process: ipc failed ... wake_up_process: ipc failed Can anyone suggest what I can try next? Does anyone have this working? I'm using the files dated 981207 and it's a 486 machine that I'm using. (The other machines that I tried grind to a halt very early on with "space.cc:179: failed assertion `size == PAGE_SIZE'".) Does someone have working binaries of "main" and "sigma0" that I could try, to see if there's something strange about my hardware? The Hello World server does run, by the way. Edmund

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l4-hackers March 1999