Hello, below are several notes from this year GSoC mentor summit that I took during OS-related sessions. Among other participants in these sessions were people from Illumos, FreeBSD, Haiku, MINIX, RTEMS, iPXE or TianoCore.
One of the most discussed topic were device drivers and problems related to their development. All the projects have troubles getting accurate hardware specifications and often the projects cannot take drivers from Linux due to licensing. There was a discussion how to cooperate when implementing device drivers but it reached no conclusion. Unsurprisingly, everyone has its own needs and for most projects taking implementation from FreeBSD is enough. Another topic was an idea of an (GSoC targeted) umbrella organization for minority operating systems projects. Having the umbrella organization should simplify some administrative tasks but the main reason is that one bigger "OS organization" shall stand better chance of being accepted. However, no one at the session volunteered to lead such organization. Last thing worth mentioning was the discussion of some common mailing list and wiki for small OSes because we face similar issues. Notes below cover individual projects/topics that I found interesting and worth sharing. MINIX had as one of the projects a fault injection framework [1] that uses LLVM to inject faults at compile time. I haven't looked into implementation details but such project would make sense for us as well - our servers shall be robust and this is one way to test it (especially for error paths that rarely occur, such as IPC fault). iPXE team introduced their project for network booting [2]. The goal of the session was to boot other OSes present over network using iPXE. It was pretty amazing and in the end we were able to boot HelenOS over network. The script is available at [3] if you want to try it yourself. The people from iPXE actually created an improved script that took care of architecture detection (PC 32bit or 64 bit) but I was not able to find it. Hopefully, it would appear on their website. TianoCore [4] is an open source implementation of UEFI. What I found interesting is that they have their own drivers - for example EHCI is here [5]. Jakub J. can probably comment more on what TianoCore offers. And that's all from me. Enjoy the weekend. - Vojta [1] http://wiki.minix3.org/en/SummerOfCode2012/FaultInjection [2] http://ipxe.org/ [3] https://gist.github.com/3928675 [4] http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/ [5] http://tianocore.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=tianocore/edk2-MdeModulePkg;a=tree;f=Bus/Pci/EhciDxe _______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.modry.cz/cgi-bin/listinfo/helenos-devel
