Re: Again: (self)hosted Plan9? Was: [9fans] extending xen to allow driver

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On 12/6/06, Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
> > I guess the Plan9 Kernel could be separated in two layers, the upper
> > one just doing "high-level" and 9P-protocol stuff, and a lower one,
> > providing the #-channel interfaces to the upper layer and doing I/O.
>
> My thoughts are along similar lines.  My approach would be to expose
> the device drivers in a hardware dependent "BIOS" as Plan 9 devices,
> adding only as much OS glue at this level as makes this possible.
> This would be as close as damn what we know as 9load today.
>
> The Plan 9 kernel is the only one that would be able to interface to
> this BIOS currently, but over time it ought to be possible, mutatis
> mutandis, to boot other OSes on this layer.  My dream is that the BIOS
> could then be extended by the hordes of device driver writers and
> every compliant OS would be able to use new devices immediately.

well, we're trying to sort of do that now. We're using linux as the
driver layer. It's not what you guys want implementation-wise, but it
is something  like the idea.

It's not that drivers are fundamentally hard. It's that the hardware
we work with is undocumented crap. Linux drivers know all the secrets;
we're riding on that knowledge.

ron