Hello,
The more I go forward, the more questions come to me :
http://lists.tunes.org/archives/tunes/1995-June/000617.html
the exokernel paper says somewhere that all the exokernel does is to securely multiplex the cpu (that's time) and memory (that's space) ressources. that's what you said you want from a good os in your `why ...' paper. and some months ago, i observed that the os may be viewed as a device driver for these two because that's what device drivers should do: securely multiplex some hardware ressource
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/l4-hurd/2006-08/msg00005.html
"In contract to our approach [L4], [Exokernel] is based on the philosophy that a kernel should /not/ provide abstractions but only a minimal set of primitives. Consequently, the Exokernel interface is architecture dependent . . . We believe that dropping the abstractional [sic] approach could only be justified by substantial performance gains. . . . It might turn out that the right abstractions are even more efficient than securely multiplexing hardware primitives or, on the other hand, that abstractions are too inflexible."
http://tunes.org/wiki/Decentralized
So would it be possible to build a general purpose OS without a kernel ?
Isn't just a matter of language *and/or* hardware architecure ?
Could we imagine a full application-level OS and link the apps directly to the drivers => so the "kernel" would be the device drivers framework ?
Or at least the ressource management system ...
Best Regards,
Will