On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 02:27:12AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 09:01:03PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote: > > > I think it is clear that one major job (perhaps *the* major job) of an > > > operating system kernel is to manage access to hardware resources > > > management up to end-user applications. > > > > The management itself doesn't have to be in the kernel. Only the > > access control. > > Not even that. The only thing that must be in the kernel is the serving of > interrupts as messages to the driver, and providing a way to get at I/O > ports (and DMA of course). But that are just the access controls, to be sure that not every ordinary program can play with the hardware. The kernel is told which task should get access to which part and then it enforces that policy. (Yeah my wording was a bit vague, I meant enforcing the access control policy. The actual policy comes from user-space of course.) Jeroen Dekkers -- Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org IRC: jeroen@openprojects
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