The L4/Darwin Project

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 1st Apr 2006 16:01 UTC, submitted by anonymous

"The L4/Darwin project is an experimental port of Darwin to the L4 microkernel to study the characteristics of a large-scale microkernel-based system. It includes a port of IOKit to L4, a modified libc to communicate with the Darbat Server, and of course XNU with many of the machine-dependent parts heavily modified (pmap, thread/task creation, etc.) but much left unchanged (most of BSD, and large parts of OSFMK work without modification)."

0 9 Comment(s)

http://osne.ws/ay7

Post a Comment

Interesting

by charles on Sat 1st Apr 2006 17:06 UTC

Member since:
2005-06-30

I'm looking forward to trying this out soon. I've been a fan of the L4 microkernel family for quite a while; it's good to see that there's still a lot of activity going on with it.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

Sick of April Fool

by rylps on Sat 1st Apr 2006 17:06 UTC

Member since:
2006-04-01

I bet 10 � that it's a joke. Damned, why did I open my news aggregator
today anyways?

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

RE: Sick of April Fool

by smitty_one_each on Sun 2nd Apr 2006 17:59 UTC in reply to "Sick of April Fool"

Member since:
2005-07-07

So was Parrot, ye of little faith.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

hopefully true...

by CaptainPinko on Sat 1st Apr 2006 17:32 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-21

Since this looks like one of them most interesting projects in ages.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

great!

by broken_symlink on Sat 1st Apr 2006 18:05 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-06

maybe one day we will be able to replace darwin/mach on os x with this.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

Very nice indeed

by alcibiades on Sat 1st Apr 2006 20:56 UTC

Member since:
2005-10-12

One has read so many sites like this. Very well done. The acronyms that almost seem to make sense. The people. The casual tone. Liked it a lot.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

This way..

by fithisux on Sun 2nd Apr 2006 09:03 UTC

Member since:
2006-01-22

x86 opendarwin may have a future.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 1

MacOS X on L4

by jonas.kirilla on Sun 2nd Apr 2006 18:13 UTC

Member since:
2005-07-11

If Darwin gets fully ported to L4, is it "too late" to switch MacOS X to it?

Are there any forseeable issues with device-driver compatibility, application-level API compatibility, or merely a matter of convincing developers on the benefits?

Some may say the Linux kernel is a better choice, but the object-oriented IOKit would make less sense on (or in) the Linux kernel. Driver support is paramount. What would benefit MacOS X the most? What would be the most technically elegant solution?

Revenge of the sub-microkernels?
This will be interesting.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 2

RE: MacOS X on L4

by SamuraiCrow on Mon 3rd Apr 2006 00:12 UTC in reply to "MacOS X on L4"

Member since:
2005-11-19

What would benefit MacOS X the most? What would be the most technically elegant solution?

Probably the solution that requires the least amount of memory. Small memory footprints have a better probability of being properly cache-loaded than do big memory footprints.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 2

OSNews