Non-Linux OS Meetup

Contents 1 OSes Present 2 Agenda 3 Minutes 3.1 Driver Compatibility 3.1.1 Key Takeaway 3.2 Toolchain Issues 3.3 Compliance Testing

[edit] OSes Present

• Minix
• Plan 9
• Haiku
• OpenSolaris
• NetBSD
• DragonflyBSD
• RTEMS

[edit] Agenda

• Driver Compatibility
• Toolchain issues
• Compliance Testing
• Future of the OS?
• Best practices?

[edit] Minutes

[edit] Driver Compatibility

• Taking BSD code is a maintenance problem (lots of groups do it).
  • How can we be helpers and not just leechers?
• Is the UDI Project helpful?
• Re-porting drivers from new versions of previously ported drivers is a real issue.
  • Semantic patches to the rescue? They know how to do specific code transformations and not simply "dumb diffs".
• Everyone wants a USB stack!
  • libBSD developed for RTEMS which implements the BSD driver interface.
• Documenting and formalizing a driver kit interface is one contribution these OSes can make.
• Keeping drivers in userland helps a lot by preventing drivers from taking shortcuts - the interface is clean and documented.

[edit] Key Takeaway

• The ROSETTA-OS group
• Common mailing list to discuss these issues: http://groups.google.com/group/rosetta-os
• Agree on an explicit API that covers the needs of all our OSes
• Agree on a few chipset drivers that everyone needs, port them to our new interface and use them as reference for further drivers.

• A SoC student for writing this next year?!
  • All these groups could co-mentor the project

[edit] Toolchain Issues

• Dragonfly struggling with pkgsrc for "x86_64 vs. amd64". Seems to be a common problem.
• Floating point instructions generated by GCC when CPU doesn't support it. GCC wants OSes to say this is an "x86 without FPU".
• GCC 3.4 didn't even compile on all targets supported by RTEMS. OSes end up doing regression testing for GCC versions: keep targets alive and maybe a record of "when it last worked"
• Deviation from POSIX in a few places? Default attributes for pthreads not defined? Porting code over without keeping this in mind is not good.
• Permission from OpenGroup to lift text from POSIX is available to RTEMS, linux-man-pages: not too hard to get.
  • meta-POSIX manual for cross-OS "deviations" for standard POSIX interfaces would be great!

[edit] Compliance Testing

• Would be great to share tests amongst the various operating systems.
  • FreeBSD has a great set of tests that are very good at catching regression bugs. Has POSIX tests too.
  • Sun is going to release test suites for Solaris.
  • Linux testing project is also a great resource.