FOSDEM 2012 - Multiserver, microkernel-based operating systems devroom

FOSDEM 2012 - Multiserver, microkernel-based operating systems devroom
*CALL FOR PARTICIPATION*
http://fosdem.org/2012

(apologies for cross-posting)

The developers of several free and open-source multiserver and/or
microkernel-based operating systems will meet at FOSDEM 2012 in
Brussels, Belgium and will share a developer room.

The devroom is currently looking for content in the form of talks
related to the area of multiserver and/or microkernel-based operating
systems. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  OS introduction to developers of other OS
  Subsystems and architecture
  Hardware and device drivers
  Tools and languages
  Release engineering and testing
  Experience and learning from mistakes
  Technical challenges
  Community and life with an OS-project
  Academia and education

Please send your talk proposal(s) to:

  microkernel-devroom <at> lists.fosdem.org

no later than by 2011-12-31.

FOSDEM 2012 -- devroom dedicated to [multiserver] microkernels, or generic alt-OS

Hi!

I was contacted by jermar on IRC, a developer of HelenOS, which is
another multiserver microkernel based OS, <http://www.helenos.org/>.

He and also some folks from the MINIX3 group were thinking whether to
propose a developer room for the upcoming FOSDEM 2012.  The idea is for
having a devroom dedicated to [multiserver] microkernels, or a generic
alt-OS room as a fallback.

The deadline for applications is in three days already.

Are we interested in this?  I said we generally are, but that I have no
idea how many of us will make it to FOSDEM next year.

Then, our group will need to find things to do in the devroom, provide a
portion of the content.  This can be (but is not limited to):
presentations, brainstorming, coding sessions.

Please answer quickly.  Are you interested in this?  Can you already
forsee whether you'll make it to FOSDEM next year, 4th/5th February 2012,
<http://fosdem.org/2012/>.

Grüße,
 Thomas

[ANNOUNCE] NOVA Microhypervisor 0.4 prerelease

Hi,

The NOVA project is happy to announce that there is a new prerelease of the
NOVA microhypervisor available for download at http://www.hypervisor.org/
under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.

NOVA is based on a modern microhypervisor written in C++ and assembler.
The current implementation runs on multi-core x86 machines that support ACPI,
under QEMU (including VM support), and as a microkernel in a virtual machine
on top of itself. 

NOVA makes use of hardware virtualization features such as Intel VT-x/VT-d
or AMD-V, and facilitates running unmodified guest operating systems in
virtual machines with near-native performance.

Among other things, the new prerelease improves the security of device- and
interrupt assignment by using capabilities for these operations. There is
also a new hypercall for interacting with the scheduler.

At the same time, we've released a new version of the NOVA Userland (NUL).
While there are few user-visible changes, a lot has changed under the hood.
We have integrated a central admission server that is going to implement
global policies for CPU time distribution in a future release. Another
notable development is rudimentary libvirt support, which will eventually
replace the old configuration syntax.

Cheers,

	- Udo

uint64_t OR l4_uint64_t

booting viengoos with GRUB2 v. 1.99~rc1

Has anyone gotten viengoos to boot using GRUB2 v. 1.99~rc1? I get the
following errors in qemu when try to boot Viengoos:

error: invalid offset in section header.
error: you need to load the multiboot kernel first

Looking at the date of the patch recommended for GRUB at
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/viengoos/building.html ,
I figured that v. 1.97 would be the closest tried and tested version
of GRUB and therefore might work with viengoos. Unfortunately, v1.97,
v1.97.1, v1.97.2 and v1.98 don't cross-compile on my PPC computer.
Here are the errors I get when compiling v1.97:

gcc -Iutil/i386/pc -I../util/i386/pc -I. -I./include -I../include
-Wall -W -DGRUB_LIBDIR=\"/home/sudoman/src/gnuhurd/failedgrub/7/build/../install/lib/`echo
grub/i386-pc | sed 's&^&i386-pc-linux-gnu-&'`\" -g -O2 -DGRUB_UTIL=1
-MD -c -o grub_setup-util_i386_pc_grub_setup.o
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c:38: error: initializer element is not constant
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c:38: error: (near initialization for
‘grub_gpt_partition_type_bios_boot.data1’)
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c:38: error: braced-group within expression
allowed only inside a function
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c:38: error: braced-group within expression
allowed only inside a function
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c:38: warning: missing initializer
../util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c:38: warning: (near initialization for
‘grub_gpt_partition_type_bios_boot.data1’)
make: *** [grub_setup-util_i386_pc_grub_setup.o] Error 1

It looks like I'm not the only one running into similar problems on a
PPC machine:

http://www.mail-archive.com/grub-devel <at> gnu.org/msg16467.html

I figure going back to 1.96 or older would be going back too far.
Compatibility with PPC is bound to be worse in the past, as they have
been adding support for booting PPC over time. So building the tools
on PPC will probably be fruitless as well, which is where the above
failures have been occurring. I also tried using the sources for
v1.98, provided by Debian with patches and all, but I still ran into
the same error. I know the cross-compiler's not at fault, since it's
the regular gcc that's being used above.

Another thing is that when I start qemu, I get an "error: file not
found" error after a "Welcome to GRUB" message, but before the GRUB
menu. Since the "Viengoos" option loads, I am assuming that my config
file was loaded. In the off chance that my grub.cfg is the problem,
i've attached it. Also, I 've attached the diff file that I used to
get v1.99~rc1 to load the config file with the following command:

bin/i386-pc-linux-gnu-grub-mkrescue -o boot.img
--configpart='(hd0,msdos1)' --modules='*.mod'

I guess that was mostly a rant, but if anyone has any tips, tries
booting viengoos using version 1.99~rc1 of GRUB2 themselves, or sends
a patched build of v1.97 my way, that would greatly be appreciated.


-Andrew

diff --git a/util/grub-mkrescue.in b/util/grub-mkrescue.in
index 690bddb..2457f4c 100644
--- a/util/grub-mkrescue.in
+++ b/util/grub-mkrescue.in
@@ -56,6 +56,7 @@ Make GRUB rescue image.
   -v, --version           print the version information and exit
   -o, --output=FILE       save output in FILE [required]
   --modules=MODULES       pre-load specified modules MODULES
+  --configpart=PARTITION  PARTITION containing /boot/grub/grub.cfg [optional]
   --rom-directory=DIR     save rom images in DIR [optional]
   --xorriso=FILE          use FILE as xorriso [optional]
   --grub-mkimage=FILE     use FILE as grub-mkimage
@@ -100,6 +101,9 @@ do
     --modules=*)
 	modules=`echo "$option" | sed 's/--modules=//'` ;;

+    --configpart=*)
+	config_part=`echo "$option" | sed 's/--configpart=//'` ;;
+
     -o | --output)
 	output_image=`argument $option "$@"`; shift ;;
     --output=*)
@@ -201,7 +205,7 @@ EOF
     (for i in $(cat ${source_directory}/partmap.lst) ${modules} ; do
         echo "insmod $i"
     done ; \
-    echo "source /boot/grub/grub.cfg") \
+    echo "source ${config_part}/boot/grub/grub.cfg") \
     > ${iso9660_dir}/boot/grub/${platform}/grub.cfg

     (cd "${memdisk_dir}"; tar -cf - boot) > "${memdisk_img}"
@@ -268,7 +272,7 @@ if test -e "${pc_dir}" ; then
     (for i in $(cat ${pc_dir}/partmap.lst) ${modules} ; do
         echo "insmod $i"
     done ; \
-    echo "source /boot/grub/grub.cfg") \
+    echo "source ${config_part}/boot/grub/grub.cfg") \
     > ${iso9660_dir}/boot/grub/i386-pc/grub.cfg

     grub_mkisofs_arguments="${grub_mkisofs_arguments} -b boot/grub/i386-pc/eltorito.img
-no-emul-boot -boot-info-table \

Error - Building Time

Some Mistakes at StarUp

Hi there,
I used qemu and Grub Legacy (floppy disk image) for running kernel with
it's modules 
I follow mostly from the instruction on README
when i try to boot on grub i saw this , it's seem the kernel going to
starting , but ,it doesn't .
system stop by give me this log file on the screen (i'd typed them) 

laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:54: Booting an x2 Kernel.
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:70: Sigma0: Low 0x20000, Hight 0x29524, IP
0x20000, SP 0x0
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:75: Root: Low 0x400000, Hight 0x4d40cc, IP
0x400000, SP 0x0
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 1: Type shared(4)/0, Low 0x0,
Hight 0xfffffffffffffc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 2: Type conventional(1)/0, Low
0x0, High 0x9f000
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 3: Type arch(15)/2, Low
0x9f400, High 0x9fc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 4: Type arch(15)/2, Low
0xf0000, High 0xffc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 5: Type conventional(1)/0, Low
0x100000, High 0x7ffcc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 6: Type arch(15)/2, Low
0x7ffd000, High 0x7fffc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 7: Type arch(15)/2, Low
0xfffffffffffc0000, High 0xfffffffffffffc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memory Map 8: Type shared(4)/0, Low
0xa0000, High 0xefc00
laden (ff0720ff):kip_fixup:93: Memroy Map 9: Type reserved(2)/0, Low
0x800000, High 0x23ffc00
laden (ff0720ff):main:205:Entering kernel at address 0x15a050...

i'm new to your OS, and not read sources till now.
help me figure this out , give me some tips .

thanks,
Naghizodeh ,T.A-H

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
NTL (Null Thought List) Group  -www.ntl.ir

[ANNOUNCE] NOVA Microhypervisor 0.3 prerelease

Hi,

The NOVA project is happy to announce that there is a new prerelease of the
NOVA microhypervisor available for download at http://www.hypervisor.org/
or http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~us15/nova/ under the terms of the
GNU General Public License version 2.

NOVA is based on a modern microhypervisor written in C++ and assembler.
The current implementation runs on multi-core x86 machines that support ACPI,
under QEMU (including VM support), and as a microkernel in a virtual machine
on top of itself. 

NOVA makes use of hardware virtualization features such as Intel VT-x/VT-d
or AMD-V, and facilitates running unmodified guest operating systems in
virtual machines with near-native performance.

The new release brings virtual-machine support to QEMU and older AMD CPUs,
both of which lack nested paging. Furthermore, the microhypervisor can now
translate related capabilities during message passing.

Cheers,

	- Udo

Viengoos still active?

Hi,

 I'd like to know the status of the Viengoos project. Is it still active? Looking at git:

last change	Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:34:13 +0000

The last change was made almost a year.

The question is: Is there still a project for a new GNU microkernel aside GNU Mach? Is Viengoos it or are there
new projects blooming?

Thank You

If help is needed

Hi!

I would like to help in any way I can this project. To give you an 
overview of my skills I am a fairly good c,c++ programmer and I have 
some basic understanding Operating Systems and hardware architecture. 
Please let me know If I can help in any way.

Thank you!

Scheduling of "foreground" applications

Hi,

A while back in some discussion here the idea was mentioned to
automatically give "foreground" applications more priority.

Someone just brought up an old paper, which -- if I'm reading the
abstract right -- seems to be about doing precisely that:

   http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/cinci93/full_papers/evans.txt

-antrik-