Re: L4Env

[Lars Reuther]

Hi Ian,

Ian Duggan <address@hidden> writes:
> Where can I find out more information about the L4Env project? I'm
> interested in know what the goals of it are, what's been done so far,
> and what's left to be built?

The main goal of the L4Env project is to provide abstractions for the
basic system services to application programmers. This includes the
management of tasks, threads, memory, I/O resources and
synchronization. We are currently discussing about more things to be
included into L4Env (like a minimal libc, nameservice, task startup
code, application loader, ...), but didn't agree on that yet. 
Our motivations for starting L4Env were
- ease the application development on L4
- reach more portability with respect to the different L4 API version
  but (we hope) also with different hardware architectures 
Closely related to L4Env is an IDL compiler for L4 IPC. We used Flick
so far, but we are currently switching to our own IDL compiler, DICE.

We already implemented some of the L4Env components, the
documentations can be found on the L4 Developer's Bibliography web
page. We hope to release a snapshot in the next 1 or 2 months. 

> I'm particularly interested in how it relates to using drivers from
> Linux with L4. I've found a few Doxygen pages on the Dresden server, but
> they look very minimal. Is there something more that could be perused?

Our Linux device driver emulation framework uses the L4Env. Christian
Helmuth wrote his Diploma thesis about the driver emulation framework
(in german), a short position paper in english and slides of a
presentation can be foud at
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~reuther/helmuth.pdf
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~reuther/helmuth_slides.pdf

Lars

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. Lars Reuther          Dresden University of Technology
Department of Computer Science   Operating Systems Research Group
Phone: +49 (351) 463-38401       Fax: +49 (351) 463-38284
address@hidden     http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~reuther/