This email is here to announce the availability of a port of ORBit (the
GNOME ORB) to the Linux kernel. This ORB, named kORBit, is available from
our sourceforge web site (http://korbit.sourceforge.net/). A kernel ORB
allows you to write kernel extensions in CORBA and have the kernel call
into them, or to call into the kernel through CORBA. This opens the door
to a wide range of experiments/hacks:
* We can now write device drivers in perl, and let them run on the iMAC
across the hall from you. :)
* Through the use of a LD_PRELOAD'd syscall wrapper library, you can
forward system calls through CORBA to an arbitrary local/remote machine.
* CORBA servers are implemented as Linux kernel modules, so they may be
dynamically loaded or unloaded from a running system at any time. CORBA
servers expose their IOR's through a /proc/corba filesystem.
* Filesystems may be implemented as remote CORBA objects and mounted on
the local machine, by using 'mount -t corbafs -o IOR:... none /mnt/corba'
This are just some of the features available _RIGHT_NOW_ that are
supported by kORBit. I'm sure that YOU can think of many more.
Implementation:
We implemented this port by providing a user->kernel mapping layer that
consists of providing standard system header files for the "user" code to
#include. In these header files, we do the mapping required. For
example, we implement a <stdio.h> that #defines printf to printk (as a
trivial example). Only user level code sees or uses these wrappers... all
of our modifications to the Linux kernel are contained within the
linux/net/korbit subdirectory.
This is currently implemented with a 2.4.0test10 kernel, although forward
porting should be very easy. This project was implemented as a cs423
semester project by Chris Lattner, Fredrik Vraalsen, Andy Reitz, and Keith
Wessel at the University of Illinois @ Urbana Champaign.
Unresolved issues:
* Our poll model is not optimial. Currently we actually do a real poll on
a (struct socket *) set. This causes relatively high latencies (on the
order 1 second, worst case) for CORBA requests. Our waitqueues are not
working quite as well as they should. :)
* Security is completely unimplemented. Someone could use corba
interfaces to read any file on your system, for example (if the
CORBA-FileServer module is installed). Thus, this is really more for
prototyping and development than actual real world use. :)
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at:
Chris Lattner, Fredrik Vraalsen, Andy Reitz, Keith Wessel
<korbit-cvs@lists.sourceforge.net>
btw, yes we are quite crazy, but what good is it to be normal and
conformist afterall? :)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 15 2000 - 21:00:15 EST