Driver available?

[Michael Hohmuth]

Christian Stueble <stueble at 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. ;-)

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.

> 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
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.

Michael
-- 
hohmuth at innocent.com, hohmuth at inf.tu-dresden.de
http://home.pages.de/~hohmuth/