Is L4Linux can use its existed Linux driver to access hardware device?

Zhe Zhao zhe.alex.zhao at gmail.com
Mon Sep 5 11:36:51 CEST 2016


Hi,

Thanks for your answers, I really appreciate it.

I tried to run L4Linux and L4Re in a qemu environment, is it support SMP
already? I found I only have a single core L4Linux running. and Fiasco
report only one scheduler instance.

And is it possible to direct reuse the L4Linux's driver instead of rewrite
them in L4Re? is that IO manager used to mapping all needed device physical
address to L4Linux's memory space? Is that mean I can map
all device direct to L4Linux through IO manager?

Is there any work ongoing to support ARM64 on L4Re and L4Linux? It will be
quite interesting consider most of the ARM device are moving to be 64 bit
arch.

Do you have some recommend documents for the newbie like me to get a quick
start up?


Br
Alex

2016-09-02 14:24 GMT+08:00 Matthias Lange <matthias.lange at kernkonzept.com>:

> Hi,
>
> On 08/31/2016 02:35 PM, Zhe Zhao wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > After read the basic ideas of L4Linux I have some questions related to
> it.
> >
> > Is L4Linux run as a paravirtualization VM on L4Re? Then the traditional
> > Linux Process just still compiled against Linux system and put them
> > together with L4Linux disk image?
> > so it means L4Re works like qemu and Linuxl?
>
> No, L4Re does not work like qemu.
>
> > or L4Re works as a micro kernel operating system, and L4Linux run as a
> > process on it, all devices handled to L4Linux to reuse the drivers of
> > L4Linux? and the previous Linux process
> > compiled with Linux, but run direct on L4Re as L4 processes which
> > communicate with L4Linux through IPC?
>
> L4Linux is a modified version of the Linux kernel with the hardware
> abstraction layer (HAL) implemented using L4Re primitives. Technically
> L4Re appears to be "just" another hardware architecture for the Linux
> kernel, just like ARM or MIPS.
>
> L4Linux runs as a user space task on top of the L4Re microkernel and at
> the (Linux) kernel ABI is unmodified which allows to run existing Linux
> programs. That means, you can compile "normal" Linux programs with your
> standard tool chain, put the binary onto a ramdisk or disk image and run
> it with L4Linux.
>
> > it is quite confused after read a little of the codes, in L4Linux, seems
> > there is some injection of L4 task stuffs inside thread_struct of Linux,
> > but also have some vCPU related stuffs,
> > can you help me about what is the real behavior of L4Linux?
>
> Each (Linux) process is actually an L4Re task with the exception and
> page fault handler set to the L4Linux task. That's why some L4-specific
> additions are required to Linux kernel data structures.
>
> Matthias.
>
> > I'm sorry to ask this basic questions, but after some digging I feel
> > quite confused about how it works.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Br
> > Alex
>
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