[ros-dev] Porting ReactOS to the L4 micro-kernel

[Aleksey Bragin]

	Hi,
what I can tell right away, is that it's a very interesting, suitable  
for diploma thesis work, but it's a challenge. You should posses  
general knowledge about operating systems development, and more  
specific knowledge about NT-based kernels, L4, and Linux.

The only problem may be
> I am not very experienced in C or assembler programming but am
> motivated to learn. But before i start working on that topic i have
but that could be compensated by outstanding OS dev skills /  
architecture knowledge.


 From the side of ReactOS Development Team, I'm sure you will have  
support in terms of either visiting the irc-channel #reactos on  
freenode or asking questions in this mailing list.


WBR,
Aleksey Bragin.

On Oct 10, 2007, at 3:08 PM, Henning Schild wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> i am thinking of porting ros to the L4 micro-kernel as topic for my
> diploma thesis. The operating systems group in Dresden already ported
> Linux to L4 (http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/LinuxOnL4/) and proofed
> that L4 offers all that is needed to run an operating system in
> userspace on top of it.
>
> The goal of the work would be to be able to run windows applications
> next to miro-kernel applications. And to compare the performance with
> that of pure ros, L4Linux/wine and windows. A comparison between the
> port and L4Linux could also be part of the work. (mapping processes to
> L4 tasks, memory management, interrupt-handling and so on)
>
> I am not very experienced in C or assembler programming but am
> motivated to learn. But before i start working on that topic i have
> some questions on the portability of ros.
>
> In svn and on the ros website i found that there is a ppc port of ros.
> And on irc someone told me that there is ongoing work on a ros  
> usermode
> port. I also read about a xen port. But i did not yet find working
> copies of the any of that ports. I built ros for i386 on my
> machine and was able to boot it in vmware. I also tried building the
> latest svn version with ROS_ARCH=powerpc but that did not succeed.
>
> 1. Did anyone ever finish a port to another arch?
> 2. How portable is ros in general? Meaning how much code would have to
> be changed. I hope there are abstractions and only 10-15% of the  
> kernel
> would have to be changed.
> 3. Do you believe that one person new to ros can finish that kind of
> work in 6 months? I know that might be hard to answer but how long did
> any of you need to learn ros in detail?
> 4. If there are working ports,  how long did it take to implement  
> them?
> If there are not, what are the reasons they where never finished? I am
> thinking of lots of assembler and i386 hacks.
>
> 5. Finally, what do think of the idea itself?
>
> I hope you take the time to answer my questions. I am still on the way
> to determine whether i really want to do that and whether i can do  
> this
> in 6 months.
>
> regards,
> Henning Schild