A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Dan]

Alexander Panek Wrote:
> Now those are some ideas and encouragement. Thanks! :)

Indeed.

Lately a big thing in kernel development world is to move everything possible out of the kernel.  Why?

The kernel is supposed to provide one thing and one thing only: securely allowing multiple programs to run.

To that end, the best kernel is the smallest one that is proveably secure and can efficiently use other programs to do hardware management stuff (read:drivers)

So when I think of a kernel, I write an exokernel that controls the system by means of controlling the:

1) memory
2) ports
3) thread/process switcher attached to timer interrupt

If you control memory, you control what agents can be loaded where and when.  If an agent cannot get memory for a code block, they obviously cannot run it.

Just my view.  As I said, I'm interested in helping.  Unfortunately, I've been pulling overtime the last few so I haven't had a chance to try getting on freenode.net again.