Re: Ada Microkernel?

[gerhard.nospam@bigfoot.de (Gerhard Häring)]

On Fri, 01 Jun 2001 21:09:12 -0400, B. Douglas Hilton wrote:
>Hi group.
>

>I'm I Debian Hurd hacker, and am thoroughly disgustapated with the Mach
>sources. Recently I have been redoubling my efforts to use more modern
>languages such as Ada and Python in everything I do.

Ada and Python are my favourites, too. I'm only annoyed by Ada's lack of good
free libraries (compared to Java and Python, at least). But for kernel
programming, this is a non-issue.

>Are there any sample microkernels written in Ada, perhaps for oskit? I think a
>kernel would ultimately really benefit from being written in such a robust
>language as Ada.

Hmm. From time to time people complained about the Mach sources on the Hurd
list. More than once somebody proposed to switch to L4. That's what I'd do,
too.

L4 is a microkernel interface with implementations for x86, Alpha, MIPS,
PowerPC. x86 is stable, and I believe Alpha, too. There is a Linux 2.2.0
implementation on top of L4 by TU Dresden. Lots of research is done on top of
L4, including an IBM operating system research project called Sawmill, guess
what, it's a multi-server system on top of a L4 microkernel. Not quite unlike
Hurd, isn't it? Unfortely, I haven't found publicly available code.

>I know this is way out of my league, but I'm sitting here dreaming about
>rewriting GNUMach in Ada.

This reminds me of the AdaOS project (http://www.adaos.org). They plan to build
the OS on a microkernel. It's mainly good for people who are dreaming ;-)
Almost two years and no code. Nuff said. 

Gerhard

PS: What about a PythonOS? I thought about rewriting the Unix services
(startup, configuration files, all the simple stuff like echo, identd, ...) in
Python. It would be mainly a network programming exercise. For me, the most
annoying thing on Unix resides in /etc. This should be replaced by XML files,
IMHO.

The hard part is already done, I would start on top of a Linux kernel and glibc
(though it should work on any Unix and libc). The first thing would be
/sbin/init Any ideas?
-- 
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