(I found this moth-old thread in kernel cousin.) David Madore wrote: > However, what you're interested in, I suppose, is the possibility of > running Mach as a user process under Linux. I do not think this is > possible (without considerable efforts, involving a major rewrite of > Linux, or else using some dirty tricks like emulating the entire > machine, ? la VMWare).
I think it is possible, and the tricks involved wouldn't be that dirty. I'm running a project similar to user-mode Linux. But instead of porting Linux to its own system call interface, I'm porting Linux to run on top of a machine abstraction layer. The abstraction layer is called a386 and is a C library. The library provides all the usual hardware facilities, like context switching, paged virtual memory, interrupts, etc. Now that Linux on a386 is getting more and more stable, I'm looking for other kernels to port. NetBSD is on the list, but troublesome to compile in the usual GNU environment. Maybe GNUMach is easier?