Re: what's next for the linux kernel?

[linux-os (Dick Johnson)]

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 10:50:00AM +0300, Meelis Roos wrote:
>> LKCL>  the code for oskit has been available for some years, now,
>> LKCL>  and is regularly maintained.  the l4linux people have had to
>>
>> My experience with oskit (trying to let students use it for OS course
>> homework) is quite ... underwhelming. It works as long as you try to use
>> it exactly like the developers did and breaks on a slightest sidestep
>> from that road. And there's not much documentation so it's hard to learn
>> where that road might be.
>>
>> Switched to Linux/BSD code hacking with students, the code that actually
>> works.
>
> Can oskit be worse than nachos where the OS ran outside the memory space
> and cpu with only applications being inside the emulated mips processor?
> Made some things much too easy to do, and other things much to hard
> (like converting an address from user space to kernel space an accessing
> it, which should be easy, but was hard).
>
> I suspect most 'simple' OS teaching tools are awful.  Of course writing
> a complete OS from scratch is a serious pain and makes debuging much
> harder than if you can do your work on top of a working OS that can
> print debug messages.
>
> Len Sorensen
> -

But the first thing you must do in a 'roll-your-own' OS is to make
provisions to write text to (sometimes a temporary) output device
and get some input from same. Writing such basic stuff is getting
harder because many embedded systems don't have UARTS, screen-cards,
keyboards, or any useful method of doing I/O. This is where an
existing OS (Like Linux) can help you get some I/O running, perhaps
through a USB bus. You debug and make it work as a Linux
Driver, then you link the working stuff into your headless CPU
board.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.13 on an i686 machine (5589.55 BogoMips).
Warning : 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.

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