Hey all, I'm back for a little bit. I've been giving SharpOS quite a bit of thought lately, and I have an idea about implementation. I pitched an idea like this in a chat we had long ago, but I think it fell on deaf ears. Here's my idea for how we could implement this beast.
First, our boot loader loads up assembly called init. Init is written in C# (doesn't have to be, but it would be nice), and basically only has hard coded read-only file system drivers. It's compiled as EIC, meaning that the AOT compiler can compile it as simple machine code, no dependencies. Init's job is pretty simple. First, it sets up the stack and the heap (stack grows downward in memory, heap upward). Next, it mounts the root device as read-only, loads mscorlib into a special place in memory, and then loads the kernel executable into another place in memory. It then sets up any last environment things, and jumps to the kernel. The kernel then has control and has a working stack and heap. It can start loading modules. It can start doing its work. Now, sharing libraries. Mscorlib is already in memory, why can't we reuse it? We can. When an application needs to access a library, the instruction pointer will change to a method of the library, but the stack / heap pointers will stay the same. Later, if we decide to have separate address spaces, we can use paging and map where ever those libraries are to a portion of the address space. So, I ask you, what's wrong with this picture? I never understood the need for a "stripped down" mscorlib. Johann ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ SharpOS-Developers mailing list SharpOS-Developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sharpos-developers
