Driver available?

[Christian Stueble]

Am Mon, 11 Oct 1999 schrieben Sie:
> 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. ;-)
I´m 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
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 Christian Stueble............stueble at ls6.cs.uni-dortmund.de
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