Information on implementing L4

[John]

Hi all.

I've been looking at Google and Wikipedia for information about L4, and
it's fairly thin.  I've come up with that L4 has read and write registers
and performs IPC by fixed-length registers, with all actions synchronous (I
guess that means you send a message and block until the target thread reads
the message).

Is there a more concrete document anywhere about implementing an L4
microkernel and what makes it L4?

I'm surveying the field at the moment and looking at all the advances made
in computer software—security, managed language runtimes, hypervisors,
real-time OS—and trying to project the possibilities for a next-generation
operating system.  There's enough divergence that a rewrite from scratch
might make sense; and besides, I've drawn up a method for getting a
self-hosting CLR running with only anonymous memory allocation and VFS file
page mapping, along with a method of getting the CLR to self-host and
getting it up and running before an actual OS kernel.

In other words:  it's readily-achievable to write a CLR in C#, get it
running on itself before the kernel comes up, then load a kernel, VMM, VFS,
ABI, scheduler, and so forth—all written in C#, compiled to CIL, and
totally independent of the hardware architecture underneath—and then throw
away the loader and bring up init.  The kernel would need to use an
abstract factory model to do common tasks which require hardware-specific
code, and the CLR would need to load an assembly with a concrete factory
for the particular hardware and a few built-in native assembly calls; but
it's doable.

This is all theoretical at the moment, and I want to explore the particular
edges a little to see what I find out.
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