Hi Folks,
I've had a look around the L4 web site and I've got a few questions...
I'm interested in putting L4 on a 'new' processor core (although strictly as an unofficial spare-time activity). I have experience of porting Chorus to two different cores and I've done various other mk-related stuff so I wouldn't be going in entirely cold.
Is there a recommended route for doing this? I suppose that I could either write a new implementation from scratch or port an existing one. L4Ka looks quite attactive as it already exists for more than one platform and it's available under the GPL. OTOH the L4/x86 reference manual is so short that a new implementation doesn't look too daunting. Would anybody like to guess how long either route would take?
I'm also wondering how stable L4Linux (particularly the 2.2.x kernel version) actually is. I see on the mailing list that some simple commands can crash the kernel, but is this typical? I don't want to run anything large like a RH distribution but a stable kernel+bash would be great.
If I were to write or port an L4 MK I expect that initial versions wouldn't be well optimised for my CPU architecture. In this situation how would it's performace compare to (for example) mach? Does L4's performane advantage come from optimisation of the implementation or from its architecture? The literature suggests the latter however I note that many L4 implementations are written in assembler and that there are performance concerns about Hazelnut.
Thanks.