On Thursday 23. January 2020 16.03.55 Martin Decky wrote: > > > If you have any concrete suggestions of systems other than L4Re that > > provide a decent, if basic, level of support for running user space > > programs written in mature languages, that work on the MIPS architecture, > > and that have not already laid down a rigidly prescriptive system > > architecture that would make experimentation awkward, I would obviously > > like to hear them. > > HelenOS offers decent (but basic) support for running user space programs > written in C, C++ and to a lesser degree in Python, Lua and Java. There is > a feature branch with Go support.
It sounds like it might be worth examining more closely. > Our MIPS support is limited to the ancient Malta development board and > emulators, but it could be extended to platforms such as Ben NanoNote and > CI20 quite easily (actually, both have been our GSoC project ideas for > several years). I doubt that you will have read (or wanted to read, at least in full) the articles I wrote about extending the MIPS support in L4Re and Fiasco.OC to the Ben NanoNote [1], but is there any relatively in-depth documentation describing approaches to supporting new hardware in HelenOS? > I am too biased to judge whether HelenOS' architecture is rigidly > prescriptive, but we are definitively all about experimentation :) That is good to hear, at least. These days, many people appear to be rather jaded about applying new ideas or re-applying old ones to operating systems. I completely understand that all the money is elsewhere (in "cyber", apparently), but it seems to me that there is a wealth of interesting work that could fairly readily be re-evaluated and revived for the benefit of the humble end-user. > I would guess that the MIPS support is the most restrictive requirement from > your set that probably rules out most of other potential candidates. I think that it is pretty inexcusable for a lot of new systems not to be portable. While there may be some useful hardware features supported by specific silicon vendors, and while some systems may leverage such features to demonstrate a particular kind of solution, there is a real risk of such systems ending up in niches, particularly if the vendors change direction and switch technologies or if those features are flawed, need refinement, and all the usual pitfalls involved in relying on silicon vendors. > But there might be a new mature real-time microkernel-based OS with MIPS > support released as open source soon. Let's watch the HIPPEROS talk at > FOSDEM 2020 and let's keep our fingers crossed. It will be interesting to hear what comes of this. I guess that anyone anticipating success with their own proprietary microkernel technology should take note of the lessons that will presumably be given by this talk. Anyway, thanks for the recommendation, and if there is anything in particular that you feel a broader audience should know about HelenOS, please feel free to weigh in. My focus has been on L4Re specifically, but there are always possibilities to learn from what other systems do. Paul [1] https://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=2147 _______________________________________________ l4-hackers mailing list l4-hackers@os.inf.tu-dresden.de http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/mailman/listinfo/l4-hackers
