Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 11:29:55 +1000 From: "Andrew Reilly" <reilly@zeta.org.au> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Tom <tom@uniserve.com> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Heads up on LFS Message-ID: <19980806112955.A4299@reilly.home> In-Reply-To: <199808050751.AAA21008@usr02.primenet.com>; from Terry Lambert on Wed, Aug 05, 1998 at 07:51:42AM %2B0000 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980804211911.6183A-100000@shell.uniserve.ca> <199808050751.AAA21008@usr02.primenet.com>
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On Wed, Aug 05, 1998 at 07:51:42AM +0000, Terry Lambert wrote: > > What is SpinOS? Are you sure it is BSD LFS, or is there own LFS? > > An exokernel OS. > It's written in > Modula 3 (of all things) and incorporates nullfs and lfs from FreeBSD, > as well as CAM. I don't think that "of all things" is particularly fair: their reasoning for the entire viability of the project is that they rely on the strict typing and garbage collection of Modula-3 to prevent user-written kernel extensions from breaking other kernel bits. You couldn't really do it in C or even C++. The same logic is used by the Sun JavaOS folks (Java being Modula-3 in C clothes, that's hardly surprising.) The argument is interesting, but a bit too restrictive to be useful in a general purpose sense, I think. Now if you were prepared to rely on hardware memory /protection/ without using the hardware memory /mapping/, you could probably do the same thing in C or C++ (or assembly language). I believe that this has been tried in some of the Acorn ARM based OS's (RiscOS and the Newton OS.) -- Andrew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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