The DROPS team is happy to announce the first release of the
L4Env programming environment.
L4Env is a programming environment for application development on top of
the L4 microkernel family. It is developed as a part of the Dresden
Real-Time Operating System (DROPS).
Prior to L4Env, most L4 applications had their very own idea about the
environment (libraries, interfaces and so on) in which they were executed.
Almost every programmer had his own set of libraries he used to build his
applications, which resulted in huge problems if someone tried to combine
components developed by different authors. Frequent problems were
conflicting implementations of common functions (like printf) or conflicts
caused by the lack of a central management of resources like threads or
virtual memory.
The intention of L4Env is to define a set of functions which describe a
minimal environment. This minimal environment is available for every L4
application. Hence, all applications and especially all libraries can use
these functions. Libraries which are intended to be used by many different
applications should only use these functions to avoid dependencies to
other libraries.
L4Env also decreases the dependencies to a certain L4 API or hardware
architecture, making applications more portable.
L4Env is available under the GPL version 2 licence. For different
licensing schemes please contact drops(a)os.inf.tu-dresden.de.
Source distributions, documentation, and other online resources can be
found on the L4Env website:
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/l4env/
The DROPS Team
Operating Systems Group
University of Technology Dresden, Germany
