Re: Roadmap?

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 09:55:46AM +0200, Farid Hajji wrote:
> 6. Driver Support: Two models are being investigated:
>       6.1: OSKit drivers
>       6.2: L4Env (http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/bib.html#l4env)
>    We're waiting for a release of L4Env.

Uh, that can take some time :)

>    It's not yet clear wether we should stick to Mach's device API
>    or if the oskit-mach people are considering a totally new approach.
>    Basically, the drivers must be implemented in user-space (L4 API
>    sends INTs to driver threads through IPC, much like in Mach).

The Mach device interface is open, read, write, close, I don't see how you
can have anything else.  The details are almost insignificant, it's trivial
to go from one interface to another.  With one exception, and that is the
terminal interface.  Luckily, the braindead Mach terminal interface is
completely encapsulated in term/device.c (or something like that), and you
just need to rewrite this file if you use a saner semantics.

I suggest to work on putting OSKit drivers into user space now, and try to
get it working with Mach and/or L4.  Waiting for L4Env is probably not so
good an idea before we know more about it (it might after all never really
mature, while OSKit has a lot of drivers already and works quite well).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
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Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
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