Farid Hajji farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net writes in l4-hurd:
[...]
The second pressing point is to write/port a very small subset of device drivers to L4. We need a native L4 driver for ATAPI (or SCSI?) disks, so that the pager can use a real disk as backing store, and so that we can port a filesystem as well ;). Here too, no-one volunteered yet.
We in Dresden have extensive experience in porting Linux device drivers to run directly on top of L4, so if you guys have questions, don't hesitate to ask on the L4-hackers mailing list l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de.
Currently, some of my colleagues are working on a framework that allows you to (more or less) drop a Linux driver in a preconfigured source tree and get a working driver that runs on the x86 L4 kernels (L4/x86, Fiasco, L4KA). This framework, which will work with the L4Env environment we're developing, is not quite ready yet, but it might be worth the wait.
As an alternative, consider using the OSKit. We have developed a compatibility library that allows you to run applications using the OSKit (including the OSKit's device drivers) on top of L4. This work is a bit unpolished and the drivers are slow, but it's quite easy to use. I even wrote a technical report on it: URL:http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~hohmuth/prj/oskit-l4.ps.gz.
(You can find this and other reports in the L4 Developer's bibliography at URL:http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/bib.html.)
Michael