Rump Kernerl support in Minix based on NetBSD

[Daniel Morgan]

Hello,

Jean-Baptiste Boric looked into adding Rump Kernel support to Minix based on what NetBSD has.  They even built some stuff.  And there is a Pull Request for his changes.  But the PR has since been closed.

Others have looked into rump kernels as well, but Jean has a PR so others can see.

https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix/pull/185

I wonder if anyone has done anything with rump kernels lately.

Since it is way too big for one person to do, who can split this enormous task into smaller tasks so multiple people can work on it?

Tutorial on NetBSD rump kerenel

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/rump/sptut.html

http://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/

My motivation is so we can have some modern real hardware drivers for USB, SCSI, SATA, ATCI, USB sticks, NVMe SSD internal drives, etc.

Based on Jean-Baptiste - "The biggest problem so far is the lack of pthread support, which the reference POSIX hypervisor requires. This blocks at least fs-utils and the standard tests ; writing a homegrown hypervisor will probably be required anyway in order to use rump in the service layer."

So, where does someone start on pthread support?  Does this support need to be in the kernel?

Does Minix 3 have preemptive multitasking capability?

What is this POSIX hypervisor?  Is this something that NetBSD rump kernels use?

Thanks,

Daniel