Erlux

[Tony Rogvall]

Mickael Remond wrote:
> Tony Rogvall <tony@REDACTED>:
> 
> 
>>I have just started a project erlux that will run Erlang on top of the
>>Linux kernel (without user space - well you may start a user space
>>process if you like). This will be a patch to the kernel.org kernel
>>replacing the init process with the emulator loop, but not leaving the
>>kernel space. When running such a beast a SMP system will be useless
>>unless we can run the scheduler in multiple threads.
> 
> 
> Yuhm !
> Sounds very good :-)
> I do not know a lot of thing about Linux Kernel development, but what are the
> implication ?
> Does this mean you are booting the system directly to the Erlang virtual machine ?

Yes.

> How will this be related to the Erlang boot process ?

Not much, the normal boot will read from /lib/modules/erlang/lib/... 
from the root file system. The emulator it self is compiled with the 
kernel. As soon as I/We get the basic system running (i.e prompt at the 
console) then it's time to start think about:

- Bringing the network up (dhcp-client or manual config), addding routes...
- Utility for mounting (auto?) filesystems.
- Adding login, users and permissions (per process perhaps, "flame 
warning" :-) telnetd, sshd.
- Port hotplug stuff for usb/pcmcia ...
...

And plenty of nice utiltities, of course the linux hardware drivers 
remain as is, and some erlang driver for force loading them (insmod) is 
needed (could perhaps be the same as erl_ddll, when compiling loadable 
drivers one could compile them as kernel modules?

Possibly the linux kernel should be patched with the kpoll (for inproved 
polling, yes this is the case even when running in kernel space, the 
kpoll will add "notifications" of io events) and some kind of 
file-changed-events-patch for monitoring files?

> 
> Is your project hosted on Sourceforge ?
> 
No, not yet. I am not sure how the structure should look like, I am just 
poking around at the moment.

> It might be the right time to update the Erwolf project, an Erlang-Linux based
> distribution :-)
> 

/Tony