Hiho!
There's a lot discussion about what to do in FreeMWare-Project.
But what are the next steps? I think, there are some possibilities:
take a kernel (the linux kernel?) run it in vm, look where it crashes
and change the crash reason - or:
take a minimal test kernel and develop it by installing more and more
os features. I think we have to learn a lot about virualization itself,
so I favorite the second.
Most brain torturing thing may be to tinker the adress spaces in a
clever way. There are some articles in the mailing list archive about
that. To test the one or another, we should add the abstraction of
address spaces first to the test kernel. Once we have address spaces,
may be a little effort to add activities (call it threads, tasks,
processess...).
What basic techniques are needed? Catching exceptions, traps and
interrupts: detect, if it is for vm and redirect them. Emulation
of privileged instructions. Other?
I played a little bit with FreeMWare and missed some things. Will
change them next time:
* configuration details (defines, ...) in a config.h (yes, I know
top-level-config.h - has somebody a better idea?)
* parsing command lines in "user"
* reading and parsing of a config file
* give some configuration data to test kernel (for example,
address space layout of test kernel should be configurable to play
with it)
bye, jens
BTW: think, it's not sufficient to virtualize yourself kevin, because
they would run on the same hardware and slow down each other; but what
about new hardware: asymmetric multi processing? cluster? alarm clocks?
a come-into-bed-saying girl friend?
