“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).”
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.
I bet 10 € that it’s a joke. Damned, why did I open my news aggregator
today anyways?
So was Parrot, ye of little faith.
Since this looks like one of them most interesting projects in ages.
maybe one day we will be able to replace darwin/mach on os x with this.
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.
x86 opendarwin may have a future.
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.
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.