I might be having a hard time with the Japanese, but my impression is that the plan 9 processes are now also L4 userspace servers. This makes me think they're not running a paravirtualized Plan 9 on L4, but put L4 INTO Plan 9.
If they're using pistachio for L4, the code is/was pretty GNU tool chain specific. I mean it doesn't compile with GCC 4 yet to the best of my knowledge. So rather than porting the microkernel, which might be trickier, they decided to port Plan 9, which may have been a lot easier. This approach is not what I was thinking about doing, if my belief of what was done is correct (I suppose I can go look at the source anytime now), and I would approach it a lot more the same way you had mentioned, which is leave Plan 9 on the kencc compilers, and L4 to GNU, then make Plan 9 an ELF image so it could be loaded by L4's piggyback process or the GRUB multi-server spec. The approach of L4 in Plan 9 has its own benefits over just sticking Plan 9 in as a user space server paravirtualized to L4 of course that are neat to explore as well. I just wanted to go about it in a slightly different way. Dave On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Tim Newsham <[email protected]> wrote: > Any reason why they prefer to rewrite large portions of > code to use gcc rather than making use of different toolchains > for the L4 kernel and the plan9 subsystems? It seems like the > latter would be a lot less effort and result in a system that was > easier to track the original sources going forward. > > On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 10:14 PM, YAMANASHI Takeshi <[email protected]>wrote: > >> As I heard, the largest work in porting Plan 9 to L4 enviroment >> is rewriting Plan 9's C code base to be compiled on gcc >> as L4 uses the compiler for its development. >> >> The developers of LP49 themselves could chime in, but here is the link >> to the project. >> You might be surprised how much of Plan 9 has been rewritten in LP49. >> >> http://research.nii.ac.jp/H2O/LP49/LP49-e.html >> -- >> >> >> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:48 PM, David Leimbach <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Recently found a paper (again) documenting some work going on here. >> > I've lately sort of had a resurrected interest in OKL4, and I'm always >> > interested in Plan 9 stuff, so I was wondering what's happened here or >> if >> > there's any code to show for it. >> > It seems like an effort that would take more than one person, but I'm >> > spending some of my spare time investigating L4 a little more in depth >> than >> > I had previously, and trying to understand what it would take to port >> Plan 9 >> > to this platform. >> > I'm not announcing this as a project at this point, as I don't know what >> the >> > heck kind of time I'm going to have. >> > Dave >> >> >> >> -- >> YAMANASHI Takeshi >> >> > > > -- > Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com > >
