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Operating system development

Developing OSes is usually a complicated process which sometimes requires extra hardware such as In-Circuit Emulators to probe the hardware on which the OS is running. Using Adeos, OS development is eased since any undesired behavior may be controlled by an appropriate domain handler. It would even be conceivable to provide a default domain handler for OS development under which developers may have controlled direct access to the hardware they are meant to control. As Adeos is itself a kernel-module, such development domain handlers may be developed independently from Adeos.

To start OS development under a Linux/ix86-operated Adeos, one would load a Linux kernel module which would request its own domain. Thereafter, it would have full unrestricted access to the hardware available. Since developers may wish to use a safe environment for such development, the loading of such a module may be preceded by the loading of appropriate domain handler. As development advances, it should be possible to reduce the checking of the domain handler in order to provide more control over to the developed OS and its domain. At the latest stages of OS development, the interaction between the developed OS, Adeos and the host OS would resemble more and more closely the process described in the previous subsection to finally yield a fully functional OS.


next up previous
Next: Patch-less kernel debuggers and Up: Applicability Previous: General-purpose operating system resource
root 2001-02-15