2. Portability

Writing a new kernel from scratch is obviously a huge task. Pragmatically haskus-system relies on an existing kernel: Linux.

Note: the fact that haskus-system is based on the Linux kernel doesn’t imply that systems built with it have to provide a Unix-like interface to their applications. This is similar to the approach followed by Google with Android: the Linux kernel is used internally but applications have to be written in Java and they have to use the Android interfaces.

haskus-system framework and the systems using it are written with the Haskell language. We use GHC to compile Haskell codes, hence we rely on GHC’s runtime system. This runtime system works on a bare-bones Linux kernel and manages memory (garbage collection), user-space threading, asynchronous I/O, etc. The runtime system has non-Haskell dependencies (libc, etc.) which are statically linked with systems.

Supported architectures

The portability is ensured by the Linux kernel. In theory we could use our approach on any architecture supported by the Linux kernel. In practice, we also need to ensure that GHC supports the target architecture.

In addition, haskus-system requires a thin architecture-specific layer because Linux interface is architecture specific. Differences between architectures include: system call numbers, some structure fields (sizes and orders), the instruction to call into a system call and the way to pass system call parameters (calling convention).

The following architectures are currently supported by each level of the stack:

• haskus-system: x86-64

• GHC: x86, x86-64, PowerPC, and ARM

• Linux kernel: many architectures

Proprietary drivers

Some vendors do not provide open-source drivers nor documentation for their hardware. Instead they provide pre-compiled libraries and/or kernel modules. As they presuppose the use of some system libraries and services (OpenGL, X11, etc.), haskus-system doesn’t support them.