Am Mon, 11 Oct 1999 schrieben Sie:
Christian Stueble stueble@amaunet.cs.uni-dortmund.de writes:
Mehnert96 and Stange96 both describe an environment to use Linux-drivers together with L3. Is something similar available to L4/Fiasco? If yes, where can the example implementations be found?
Yes, similar frameworks have been created for a number of drivers (SCSI and ATM networking drivers come to my mind). These frameworks are more of a hackish ad-hoc nature and are in no way meant as a generic device-driver framework. These drivers (and their frameworks) have not been released publicly yet, and I don't know if there are plans to release them; I guess it would be a bit embarrasing for their authors to release them because they contain a lot of write-only, proof-of-concept code written for various research projects -- code they don't want anyone to see. ;-)
IŽm writing my diploma thesis about the SURE project at the University of Saarbruecken and I think it would help me to develop a first prototype if I could see the code. Is it possible to put the sources on a (private) ftp server or to send it to us? Please ask Hermann Haertig, I think he knows about the SURE project.
Maybe these authors or my boss will bite and clarify what their stance on releasing this code is.
However, and probably much more interesting to you, there is now a port of Utah university's OSKit (current snapshot 990722) to the L4/x86 and Fiasco interface. The OSKit comes with a lot of Linux and FreeBSD drivers, filesystems, and a complete IP stack that, with the help of a glue library the ``port'' consists of, just run on top of L4/x86 and Fiasco.
There is a piece of news at URL:http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/fiasco/ about the port (look for liboskit10_support). It also tells you where to download the stuff.
I will have a look at it.
Does L4-Linux directly access hardware ports?
Yes, the drivers contained in L4Linux directly access I/O ports.
If yes, is it possible to prevent this behavior, e.g. by inserting a new "virtual hardware layer"?
I don't understand what you mean by ``virtual hardware layer'' and what exactly you want to do, but the answer to your question probably
I mean something like vmware or freemware, based on Fiasco. BTW, has someone successfully started Fiasco running into vmware? I tried version 1.0, but got an (vmware) error message as grub tried to start the first server :-(
is yes. :) Do you want L4Linux to use drivers running in separate tasks so that it becomes possible to run L4Linux without any special hardware-access privileges? Yes, that is doable. In fact, I have been dreaming about such a setup on and off; this would make it possible to run and debug L4Linux under L4Linux.
It is important for me that L4Linux cannot influence Fiasco and its resource managers. I think this cannot be guaranteed if L4Linux is able to access the I/O ports directly. How does DROPS solve this problem? Is, for example, the SCSI subsystem, written by Frank Mehnert able to guarantee real-time behavior, if e.g. a malicious linux task accesses the I/O ports directly?
Chris