http://www.osnews.com/story/15176/A_Developer_s_Insight_Into_DROPS Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:16:10 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?142705 http://osnews.com/thread?142705 Author nicely presents different fetures of DROPS without going too much into internals/code. He also doesn't repeat "we're the best" all the time, and is honest about some problems awaiting for people who will want to hack/code for this system. Article has links to more informations, and even nice screenshots (though i think most of those different GUIs there are far from "good looking" they still show quite a lot .
All written clearly and understandable - made me want to try demo cd (i'm downloading it while typing this comment).

IMHO best entry in contest so far.

Thanks

-- edit --
fixed spelling mistake and some words layout (thanks to OSNews authors for edit option . hopefully comment is understandable.Edited 2006-07-13 19:07 Thu, 13 Jul 2006 19:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ahwayakchih) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142735 http://osnews.com/thread?142735 Security and reliability have similar goals.

http://www.minix3.org/

Less code in the kernel = better reliability and security. Thu, 13 Jul 2006 20:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Eric Martin) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142783 http://osnews.com/thread?142783 This article was very well written. The author provided enough details about the operating system environment without being excessively technical. I enjoyed reading about the author's involvement in the project. Most importantly, the author uses proficient English, making the reading not arduous at all. Each thought was succinct but still descriptive. Thu, 13 Jul 2006 23:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (samad) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142826 http://osnews.com/thread?142826 But I am a bit confused about one thing. When the author talks about running Linux OVER L4, does he mean the Linux kernel has been adapted to run modules against the L4 microkernel? Or does the author mean linux in the generic overlying tools sense?

Linux itself IS a kernel (not a micro-kernel). I guess I am just wondering if they adapted linux by layering it on top of a microkernel (and why?).

Sorry for being a dolt here.

[edit]

Just went to the L4Linux site... I think I get it now.Edited 2006-07-14 02:56 Fri, 14 Jul 2006 02:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tuishimi) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142827 http://osnews.com/thread?142827 ...So, are the goals mostly security-related? Is the performance really any better than the standard Linux kernel?

Would this be useful in virtualization? Fri, 14 Jul 2006 03:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tuishimi) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142847 http://osnews.com/thread?142847 Hi:

This is a very well written article: It describes the functionality of DROPS, gives a short but clear idea of the microkernels and L4, shows the integration to Linux and mentions the problems that they are still having.

I like a lot the L4 family (Fiasco, Pistachio, etc.) and I think it will be very important in the next years when the monolithic kernels will become harder and harder to maintain.

Excellent article, congratulations Steffen.


Ernesto Fri, 14 Jul 2006 05:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ebasconp) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142896 http://osnews.com/thread?142896 The performance is slightly worse than plain Linux because of the overhead of more context switches.

In fact, we published a paper about the performance of microkernels, by comparing L4linux on Fiasco, plain Linux and Linux on Mach. The conclusion is that the overhead "can be kept somewhere between 5% and 10% for applications". You may read the paper here:
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/pubs/sosp97/
"Performance of µ-Kernel-based Systems"

Virtualization is possible in the sense that you may run more than one L4Linux instance on top of the L4 microkernel. You should make sure that those instances use distinct drivers for hardware, to avoid collisions;-). Fri, 14 Jul 2006 10:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (steffen) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142923 http://osnews.com/thread?142923 I'll repeat it because it is necessary to repeat: This has been by far the best entry. I remember hearing about DROPS once before but I don't recall obtaining this much information about it from the article I read. I beleive this article was very well written and very informative without being overly technical and detailed. It was just the right amount of information for a news site like OSNews. Can we get steffen as an editor? Fri, 14 Jul 2006 12:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?142998 http://osnews.com/thread?142998 Cool! Thanks! Fri, 14 Jul 2006 16:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tuishimi) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?143046 http://osnews.com/thread?143046 Very educational, a good read (Y) Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) Comments