l4-hurd html page

[Zeno Gantner]

Hello,
what do you think about this page?
Sorry about the delay, I've been quite busy
(university, wisdom teeth) the last weeks.

to OKUJI:
please mail me if you have complaints about it...

to Jeff Bailey/web-hurd:
I hope you can include this page to the hurd pages
on gnu.org.

cu
        Zeno

Porting GNU Hurd to L4

Table of Contents

• Status
• Why porting the Hurd to another microkernel?
• Problems
• Mailing Lists
• Documentation
  • L4
  • Hurd
• Tools
• WWW Links
• Download

Status

Discussion. Join the list!
OKUJI Yoshinori has compiled the differences between L4 and Mach on this page.
L4-Hurd.

Why porting the Hurd to another microkernel?

• One of the design goals of GNU Hurd was to be platform (architecture, microkernel) independent. This is NOT the case at the moment.
• GNU Mach runs only on IA32 systems.
• GNU Mach doesn't support SMP.
• There are L4 implementations for IA32, ARM, Alpha and MIPS.
• L4 is being actively developed.
• L4KA "Hazelnut" supports SMP.
• In the future, L4 will run on distributed systems, perhaps the Hurd will benefit from that.
• GNU Mach is BIG (more than 100 system calls). L4 is fast and small (7 system calls).
• Mach has built-in device drivers, that means a bug in a driver can crash the whole system.
• The Hurd hasn't ever been ported to another microkernel. Porting it for the first time will help to be able to do that in the future.
  The first discussions on the mailing list have shown that there it won't be easy to do the port, one suggestion was to rewrite the Hurd servers from scratch.

Problems

• The Hurd is not that microkernel-independent as claimed in the past, it makes use of many Mach-specific features.
• Mach and L4 are quite different.
• The L4 interface is not fix yet, there will still be changes in the future.
• There are no built-in device drivers. An interface for drivers is needed.

Mailing Lists

• address@hidden: [information] [archive]
• address@hidden: [subscribe] (closed forum)
• address@hidden: [information] [archive]
• address@hidden: [information] [archive]

Documentation

L4

• Manuals
  • L4 Reference Manual API X.0 (IA32)
  • L4 User Manual (general, examples for MIPS API 2)
  • L4 Reference Manual API 2 (MIPS)
• FAQ
  • L4KA
  • L4 at TU Dresden
  • Fiasco
• Man Pages (system calls)
  • L4/IA32 and Fiasco
  • L4/MIPS
• Requirements Definition for Fiasco
• L4/Alpha diploma thesis
• Papers at UNSW
• L4KA: Publications

Hurd

• Hurd Reference Manual: [one file] [toc]

Tools

• Farid Haji wrote a patch for using Bochs to boot L4KA, there is a page containing instructions how to use it.

WWW Links

• Microkernels and MK-based Systems
  • L4KA
  • ChacmOS an example OS on top of L4KA "Hazelnut"
  • Fiasco
  • L4 at TU Dresden
  • L4 implementations (overview)
  • Debian GNU/Hurd
  • Linux on L4
  • SawMill
  a multi-server linux on top of L4, there will be a release soon...
  • Mungi another L4-based OS
• Platform specific sites
  • Hurd on Alpha
  • L4/MIPS
  • L4/Alpha

Download

There is no code yet...

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12/11/2000 feedback
If you have technical questions about Hurd/L4, please post to the mailing list.

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