On Tue Sep 14, 2004 at 08:44:30 -0700, R. Tyler Ballance wrote:
First off, I have some decent Compaq Pentium 1 desktops back home I could easily commandeer for hacking on. (I'm in college, so home is a 5 hour trip away)
Will it run fine? I know system builds will suck, but it should work fine right?
P1 boxes are supposed to work.
Secondly, I understand fully how a microkernel works, i've seen the schematics, flow charts, etc, but I'm confused at how a driver, for example, would be coded. Is it something that one hacks into userland? (Is it portable across L4 Operating Systems? (L4Linux, Fiasco, etc)
Drivers are in userland, yes (with the rights they need). Portable? Hmm, maybe you're mixing something up between Fiasco und L4Linux. Fiasco is an L4 kernel, L4Linux an L4 program running on a kernel. So L4Linux can contain drivers, or a driver can be a standalone L4 program offering the hardware functionality to clients. So a driver is more or less as portable as any other L4 program, i.e. depends on the used environment etc.
Adam