Re: booting, bochs l4ka

[Farid Hajji]

Hi Matthew!

> Now my reading of things is that:
> i) L4ka is the actual microkernel. I have therefore got the kernel from
> cvs at cvs.l4ka.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/l4ka and compiled appropriately
> (I believe)
Right. L4ka/Hazelnut is the current microkernel, but we plan to
write l4hurd on top of L4ka/Pistachio (X.2, later Version 4).
But Pistachio is not yet finished/released. In the mean time,
we use Hazelnut though.

> ii) l4hurd is the hurd translators and servers (and libraries) that are
> being adapted for l4 use rather than mach use (I do run HURD on Mach but
> am finding L4 a little more confusing).
Unfortunately, there is no l4hurd yet :-). Yes, Hurd/L4 aims to port
the Hurd libraries, translators _and_ glibc to L4[ka], but this is a
major undertaking, which is just beginning.

> So by my reckoning, I don't actually need l4hurd until I'm happy that
> l4ka is working. So on my disk image, I've copied the x86-kernel that
> l4ka created along with the apps compiled binaries and boot directly
> from grub.
As said, there is no l4hurd yet that you can use. I wish we were already
so far :-).

> Do I need any module line at all with grub? How do I get it to run the
> root task? At the moment, I'm just telling grub "root (hd0,0)
> kernel /x86-kernel"
Please read the L4 docs: You need x86-kernel as kernel, sigma0, rmgr
and at least one root-task. All that belongs in grub's menu.lst.

> which may well me because it was compiled with gcc 2.95.4. I'll get the
> latest 3.0 version ASAP.
I tried L4Ka/Hazelnut (cvs version 2 days old) with
  gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release) [FreeBSD]
and it works just fine. gcc 2.95.4 up to gcc 3.0.3 are known to
be broken and they generate corrupt binaries.

> The other reason for posting is that the guide at
> http://home.kamp.net/home/farid.hajji/l4ka-bochs/ says that one needs to
> patch l4ka with the patch
> http://home.kamp.net/home/farid.hajji/l4ka-bochs/l4-ka.patch.gz but this
> doesn't apply at all, and looks like it's very out of date. Are changes
> still needed to get it to work properly with bochs, or are all of the
> changes now committed into cvs?
> 
> Also, the same page says to use bochs 2000_0325a which is a completely
> different version numbering system than the current which seems to be
> at 1.4. Does one still need to use this (old?) version of Bochs, or do
> the newer versions work too?
The 4MB superpages patch is still present in the CVS version of Bochs,
but no-one volunteered to merge it in the main sources right now. Since
I'm currently using a physical pentium for tests, I simply didn't have
the incentive to update the patch :) Please feel free to contribute here.

The patch to l4-ka is certainly out of date. That was just a quick
hack to get going.

I'm very interested in an updated Bochs with 4MB superpages that
could boot current Hazelnut. Bochs is incredibly useful to trace
single instructions and memmory contents and is IMO easier to use
than gdb-over-serial-line :). It's not only interesting to replace
missing hardware, but _is_ useful as a fine debugging too as well.

Anyone volunteering to take over the 4MB superpages patch and help
integrate it seamlessly in the current Bochs sources? I'm very short
on time right now, but I'm willing to assist any brave soul that
wants to step forward here.

> Matthew Sackman
> Nottingham
> England

Regards,

-Farid.

-- 
Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Admin | Phone: +49-2131-67-555
Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany  | address@hidden
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