The L4Env, the L4 Environment, and DDE, the Device Driver Environment. L4Env is a programming environment for application development on top of the L4 microkernel family. DDE is an environment for Linux device drivers for using native Linux 2.4 drivers together with L4Env.
L4Env and DDE 0.1 for L4 released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’ve been messing around with fiasco and l4linux lately, and I have to say that they’re very interesting. Moving forward to linux-2.4 drivers will help things along. Most of the driver stuff to date had been based on Utah’s OSKit. While OSKit is neat, too, it’s getting pretty dated (FreeBSD 3.2 and Linux-2.2.12). The fiasco people have their own CVS version of OSKit, as do the hurd people, etc. etc. Maybe an update to that is forthcoming soon?
Back to l4, if you haven’t tried it, it’s worth it to download at least the DROPS demo disk. Running something like l4 reminds you just how fast modern hardware is. With l4linux, you can run a linux kernel on top of l4 and it works just fine. I don’t see a noticible speed hit on my machine, although it’s been benchmarked at 5-10%. Maybe I’m not paying close enough attention. :-p
I have to agree with you. The L4s are very interesting with very high potential. DROPS (wich includes Fiasco and L4Env) are unfortunatly GPL which would make it impossible to have commercial software for this platform (not that it matters at their current stage). But L4Ka’s Pistachio is BSD. I wonder if L4Ka will use L4Env or develop something of their own.
DROPS (wich includes Fiasco and L4Env) are unfortunatly GPL which would make it impossible to have commercial software for this platform
It’s this kind of naiveity that hampers OSS.
There’d be no problem having commercial software on top of L4 or L4Env, or DROPS even. The fact they are GPL is irrelevant. That’s like saying you couldn’t make GPL software for Windows because it is proprietry.
“There’d be no problem having commercial software on top of L4 or L4Env, or DROPS even. The fact they are GPL is irrelevant.”
Software has to be developed you know and if you’ve read what L4Env is you’d realize that as a kind of library every other piece of code that links to it becomes GPLed immediatly. There is already a discussion about this issue on the DROPS mailing list. By the way — AFAIK the Linux kernel makes a special exception for closed source modules too. Ask yourself why there is a LGPL.
Software has to be developed you know and if you’ve read what L4Env is you’d realize that as a kind of library every other piece of code that links to it becomes GPLed immediatly. There is already a discussion about this issue on the DROPS mailing list. By the way — AFAIK the Linux kernel makes a special exception for closed source modules too. Ask yourself why there is a LGPL.
Those very statements show how little you understand the GPL. I would explain it, but I don’t have time. :/
If you look hard enough on http://www.gnu.org you should find the answers.
“Those very statements show how little you understand the GPL.”
Is that so? Citing from the FSF <a href=”http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL“>FAQ<…
If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL?
Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.
Well, for an OS this probably isn’t a big deal since programs that sit on top of it will link in with glibc, libdl, libstdc++, etc. No programs should be linking directly into a traditional microkernel OS anyways, unless it be a new type of OS service someone wants to write. And as long as a company uses this OS service internally only it’s fine, otherwise it can license the code and sell their microkernel service or just open it up for everyone else to use.