Re: [Caml-list] Using OCaml in a kernel

[Ville-Pertti Keinonen <will@exomi.com>]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 13:48 +1300, Jonathan Roewen wrote:

> I'm developing an operating system, and I want to write as much of it
> as possible in OCaml. I had hoped to use the ocamlopt compiler, and
> have it target i586-elf, like my gcc (3.4.1) cross-compiler. I'm using
> newlib with my cross-compiler, so I have a C library available.
> 
> However, I'm lost at how to get OCaml into the mix. Anyone able to
> offer some suggestions of the sorts of things I could try?

You should familiarize yourself with how OCaml works in detail before
you even start to plan the capabilities; it isn't going to "just work".
OCaml is going to place a lot of restrictions on what you can and can't
do (e.g. if you want to make the system pre-emptible, multithreaded or
SMP-capable you either need to make significant changes to the OCaml
runtime or exercise unusual discipline - no sharing of data except
through non-OCaml objects).

Note that you don't necessarily need to set up OCaml as a
cross-compiler.  The simplest way to start would probably be to use the
native OCaml compiler on your development platform (assuming it's also
i586-elf) to compile the OCaml parts.  The part you need to build
against newlib is the OCaml runtime (libasmrun.a) - you can do that
manually.  You can then use the -output-obj option of ocamlopt to
produce a single OCaml object, which you can link against your C
objects, newlib and your manually built libasmrun.a.

There are some changes that you're definitely going to want to make if
you're serious - rip out the signal handling and I/O altogether, modify
the memory allocation interfaces etc. - but if you have something
sufficiently functional that you can get newlib to build and work, then
you might be able to get started without doing these at first.