What about using the L4Re microkernel to boot FreeBSD on a mobile device (or whatever else kind of device) ?

[getopt]

Where did they get it from?

"Vedic Sanskrit was in contact, from very ancient times, with speakers of Dravidian languages, and that the two language families profoundly influenced one another." (Shulman D., Tamil, 2016 )

 

[ziomario]

Is this topic what inspired the creation of DragonflyBSD?

why you say this ?

 

[ziomario]

And all these replies tell you exactly the same thing: No, Linux doesn't need any "fixing" (neither does the FreeBSD kernel). Still you insist otherwise. What's the point of this? If you want to make a valid point, you have to learn the theory first.

The way to make software robust, reliable, maintainable and changeable is to give it a sane structure. That's true for every piece of software, including an OS kernel. There are a lot of design principles out there giving guidance how to do it. E.g. a well known collection is SOLID. Today's "monolithic" kernels aren't "big balls of mud" as they sometimes were many decades ago, they are "modular monoliths", and work is often going on to fix inner design issues (like e.g. eliminating some global locks both in Linux and FreeBSD kernel).

The microkernel architecture enforces a structure with clear responsibilities and boundaries, therefore it is in theory the superior architecture. In practice, what a microkernel architecture could give you today is reducing the impact of bugs: Anything not affecting the microkernel itself won't bring down the whole system. That's of course only true if hardware features are used to enforce boundaries at runtime (which, again, wasn't done in AmigaOS, partially for lacking hardware support) and the affected kernel service can just "respawn" without further issues. Given today's monolithic kernels have inner structure, it just makes no sense at all to attempt a full rewrite (which would be necessary) to achieve just this theoretical advantage.

BTW, providing a "unixy" kernel in microkernel architecture is exactly what GNU Hurd is attempting for almost 34 years now ....

very thanks for this clear exposition. I'm reaching the conclusion that over a certain level of complexity,it becomes hard if not impossible to fix almost all bugs. And probably it would be even worse if a microkernel os is used because it is even more complicated to create,but again,the idea of keeping the kernel small means that all the code will be moved to the userland or to the drivers,so would be the developers to take charge of all the debugging work and at the beginning Linus was too in love with Linux not to take care of it by himself.

 

[bakul]

Now ziomario is asking the same question about L4re + FreeBSD by cross posting on *four* freebsd lists! Generally you should post to *one* mailing list that is most appropriate for your question but this one has already been answered here. Multiple times. To summarize: there is no virtue in cross building L4 on freebsd instead of linux. There no work done by anyone to run freebsd as a user application on top of L4 (unlike l4linux) and such an effort would be quite time consuming for even a freebsd kernel wizard and as there is no demand for such a thing, it is unlikely to happen.

 

[bakul]

BTW, little-endian is how our number system works. It becomes immediately obvious once you look at the arabic writing direction

I believe Arabs maintained the number digit order used by Indians when they "borrowed" Indian numbers and mathematics. While ancient India had names for many powers of tens, the *spoken* numeric order was always from biggest powers to smallest (with one exception: two digit numbers such as 21 would be spoken as one-twenty). So for instance 2134675 would be spoken as the equivalent of one-twenty-lakh, four-thirty-hazar, six-hundred, five-seventy, where lakh = 10^5, hazar = 10^3. So you might say it is a mixed Indian order! Also recall that Sanskrit and Prakrits (vernacular dialects) had been spoken for thousands of years before written scripts were used and the written digit position order followed the spoken order. Almost!

 

[hardworkingnewbie]

Now ziomario is asking the same question about L4re + FreeBSD by cross posting on *four* freebsd lists! Generally you should post to *one* mailing list that is most appropriate for your question but this one has already been answered here. Multiple times. To summarize: there is no virtue in cross building L4 on freebsd instead of linux. There no work done by anyone to run freebsd as a user application on top of L4 (unlike l4linux) and such an effort would be quite time consuming for even a freebsd kernel wizard and as there is no demand for such a thing, it is unlikely to happen.

Why... just why? Which insight do you think you will get from spamming around in mailing lists you didn't get here, ziomario?

This here is not "building operating systems from scratch 101." Andrew S. Tanenbaum wrote a book about that topic, which actually is now a free PDF. It features MINIX3, which is one of the most widely used microkernels on the planet totally unknown to the public, until it became public knowledge that the Intel Management Engine uses it as OS.

 

[ziomario]

I'd thought that L4 worked like the old project coLinux,where Linux ran as a list of processes under WIndows. In my sick mind I'd thought that L4 allows FreeBSD to run as a list of processes with the L4 microkernel itself on top. But I didn't misunderstand how it worked,sorry.