Home   Info   DevZone   Wiki  
UsersWeb  |  MainWeb  |  InfoWeb  |  DevZoneWeb  |  SupportWeb
[ DesignHurdles ] [ not logged in ] [ Web: Main ] goto:  options
[ get info on or edit ] [ login or new user ] [ list of topics, hubs & nodes, or recent changes ]

[ DesignPages ]

What's keeping us from making a JOS?

Sure, we need people, goals, direction, interest, whatever. However, I remember the good-old-days back in 1998 when JOS was very active. You know, back when we had about 8 mailing lists which people actually posted to.

What happened? We splintered, lost our direction and energy, and had nothing to show for all of our huffing and puffing.

I'm going to try to list out all the issues JOS has right dead in its face, and we're doing very little work that's visible. I'll set some ground rules: We know that there isn't just one JOS for everybody. Just look at the number of SisterProjects.

Yet there are "troubling issues" that everyone knows about, yet won't take on because they're just too hard, or we need a kernel to do that. Gilbert's been complaining about this all along. I know I'm to blame on lack-of-work, but then I've never had direction.

So, let's find these troubling issues together and knock them off together!

(Everyone: go ahead and modify this list, or add your comments below it)

  1. Inter-VM communication. I don't think anyone disagrees that any JOS worth its weight needs to support multiple VMs. How do we get them to talk to each other?
  2. DeviceDrivers. We've established BCNI, JNI has been around, and JavaOS had device drivers well defined. Why don't we? What's keeping us from defining exactly what a device driver is? JJOS has device drivers, but from what I've heard from everyone is that it's a temporary patch until we decide on something. Am I wrong? We don't need to wait for a kernel or multi-VM support or whatnot to decide at least how drivers are accessed.
  3. Hardware Access. How do we get the Drivers to talk to the Hardware? JavaOS has defined this extremely well, perhaps too well. JJOS and RJK provide a solution, too. Does this need to be standardized? Is this actually blocking anyone?
Stuff we don't have to worry about

These problems may sound scary, but they have already been solved!

  1. Launching another VM. Now that JSR 121 ( http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/121.jsp ) is an accepted specification request, we don't need to worry about designing this (it is slated for JDK 1.5).


Content of these pages are owned and copyrighted by the poster.
Hosted by: