Adam 'WeirdArms' Wiggins wrote:
Dresden proposed a user mode L4 project. Ie running L4/(arch blah)
on top of Linux/(arch blah).
I'm currently working on something like that. Give me a few months ;)
The idea I have in mind is to make a module for linux that catches the L4 syscalls and throws them back into user-space. That way a L4 environment could be setup within linux. It would be much like user-space-linux and would save a lot of reboots just to test out a few bytes of code.
The native Linux kernel already partly does this for you. L4 syscalls are reflected to user mode as SIGSEGV in the offending program. With proper handling of those signals it ought to work.
heh :) That would be an interesting project. I'd be interested to know how (if) you will deal with device drivers, memory etc.
User mode linux accesses memory through mmap'd pages. It also provides a few basic device drivers, i.e. the ubd filesystem which can possibly be made to work under L4 with some tweaking.
-Udo.