Re: [MirageOS-devel] Mirage/ARM plans

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 13 May 2014 21:47, Hannes Mehnert <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 05/13/2014 14:53, Thomas Leonard wrote:
>
> Looking briefly into runtime and MiniOS, there isn't much of a C
> library needed - or do I oversea something big? A libm, malloc, the
> common string routines, memcmp/cpy. (well, plus libgmp for zarith ;)
>
> I've the feeling we could also collect just the needed pieces (by
> adjusting the OCaml runtime to e.g. not try to access any non-existant
> file system, removing the stubs out of minios) from any libc and
> tighten the OCaml runtime in the same go.

That would certainly be cleaner (and possibly easier too). And it fits
with Mirage's goal of removing legacy layers from the stack.

I guess it depends who needs the libc. If it's just for ocaml, it
would indeed be simpler to patch ocaml. If we want to use other C
libraries, it might be a problem.

Personally, I'd be happy to remove functions like Pervasives.open_in
(which would probably make the capabilities people happy too). But I
can imagine it might mean some OCaml libraries wouldn't compile
without modifications, even if that part of them wasn't needed (e.g.
an XML library that offers the option of loading from a file).

If compiled with HAVE_LIBC, Mini-OS currently provides a minimal
filesystem API that lets you open anything under /var/log (writes then
go to the console), /dev/mem, /dev/ptmx and some things under
/var/lib/xen.

What do people think?


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard        http://0install.net/
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