[ros-dev] Porting ReactOS to the L4 micro-kernel

[Henning Schild]

Hi there,

i am thinking of porting ros to the L4 micro-kernel as topic for my
diploma thesis. The operating systems group in Dresden already ported
Linux to L4 (http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/LinuxOnL4/) and proofed
that L4 offers all that is needed to run an operating system in
userspace on top of it.

The goal of the work would be to be able to run windows applications
next to miro-kernel applications. And to compare the performance with
that of pure ros, L4Linux/wine and windows. A comparison between the
port and L4Linux could also be part of the work. (mapping processes to
L4 tasks, memory management, interrupt-handling and so on)

I am not very experienced in C or assembler programming but am
motivated to learn. But before i start working on that topic i have
some questions on the portability of ros.

In svn and on the ros website i found that there is a ppc port of ros.
And on irc someone told me that there is ongoing work on a ros usermode
port. I also read about a xen port. But i did not yet find working
copies of the any of that ports. I built ros for i386 on my
machine and was able to boot it in vmware. I also tried building the
latest svn version with ROS_ARCH=powerpc but that did not succeed.

1. Did anyone ever finish a port to another arch?
2. How portable is ros in general? Meaning how much code would have to
be changed. I hope there are abstractions and only 10-15% of the kernel
would have to be changed.
3. Do you believe that one person new to ros can finish that kind of
work in 6 months? I know that might be hard to answer but how long did
any of you need to learn ros in detail?
4. If there are working ports,  how long did it take to implement them?
If there are not, what are the reasons they where never finished? I am
thinking of lots of assembler and i386 hacks.

5. Finally, what do think of the idea itself?

I hope you take the time to answer my questions. I am still on the way
to determine whether i really want to do that and whether i can do this
in 6 months.

regards,
Henning Schild