Hi,
I was pointend do this by mmu_man, who was so thoughtful as to mention
it on the #hurd IRC channel. Indeed the Hurd is another non-Linux
group interested in driver reuse -- and we usually have at least some
people attending FOSDEM...
On Nov 20, 7:32 pm, mmu_man <
rev...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you want to participate in a non-linux devroom make sure you fill
> the form:
http://fosdem.org/2010/call_for_developer_rooms
> quoting you would like to be part of a "non-linux" devroom, either as
> part of the distro ones or separately.
> If enough non-linux projects request a devroom maybe we'll get one...
I don't think this is related to distros in any way -- the only thing
we have in common with the distro rooms is that it would be another
room shared by several organisations. And I'm not even sure it's the
same situation... I wonder, would this room be really just a shared
room for various OS projects doing their individual talks; or rather
focusing on actual exchange between the individual projects?
In the latter case, is it really necessary that each interested
subproject registers seperately? I would have thought that a single
request in the name of all participants would suffice...
> Here is what I filled, you should probably reuse the name:
> ---
> * devroom name: Alt-OS (Anything-but-Linux-disTro Operating System)
"Anything but Linux" has a negative undertone which I do not quite
like :-)
> * devroom description:
>
> Talks and workshops about alternative (non Linux based) opensource
> operating systems, in the purpose of sharing experience on application
> ports, common driver development and design differences.
Another nitpick: we do not conisider us an "opensource operating
system" -- we do free software :-)
There is a reason why the conference is called *F*OSDEM...
This list misses out several projects listed on the original mentor
summit session that started all this -- is this on purpose?...
BTW, there is another group that's missing here IMHO: the various L4
projects. The Dresden group with their DDE stuff in particular: they
created their own layer for reusing unmodified drivers from other
systems.
http://wiki.tudos.org/DDE/DDEKit
Originally they used Linux, but they also created a FreeBSD variant.
The design seems quite interesting: AIUI, they have the actual DDEs,
which integrate individual subsystems from the other kernels,
presenting a common interface to system-specific functionality; and
the DDEKit component, which implements the functionality for L4. From
the sound of it, it might be possible to reuse the DDEs on other
systems than L4, by writing different DDEKits.
The Hurd so far uses a private glue layer that runs (ancient) Linux
drivers in Mach. According to the thesis report, it originally used
unmodfied drivers -- though it seems that someone updating it later on
was less careful, as there are a few modifications to the Linux
drivers used nowadays...
In either case, we are interested in replacing the ancient drivers by
something newer of course -- ideally, running in user space. Presently
we have a former GSoC student evaluating the possibility of running
foreign drivers in user space on Mach -- either using the L4 DDE
stuff, or our own glue layer again, if DDE turns out unsuitable.
While we used Linux drivers so far (they have the advantage of much
more manpower), we consider switching to BSD as well -- these are
supposed to have more stable interfaces; and also the licensing is
more liberal. (While the Hurd is als GPL, we would like to switch to
GPLv3 -- so GPLv2 only Linux code is problematic...)
In view of these things, exchange with other groups reusing drivers
definitely makes sense :-)
-antrik-