The ol' Linux-on-Linux

[Samuel Rydh]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 12:08:06AM -0700, Dan Potter wrote:
> Thanks, everyone, for all the great work that's gone into Mac-on- 
> Linux! I've gotten both OSX 10.3 and OS9 to work pretty flawlessly  
> under it. I've run into a brick wall though. :)
> 
> My concept was to turn a Mac into a mini-mainframe by running an OSX  
> file server and two Linux virtual machines under MOL. Based on the  
> docs and included config files, it would seem that it's pretty  
> simple. But I'm finding that that's not the case. And after about 3  
> hours worth of Googling I've found no real hints on how to proceed,  
> or even that anyone else has been successful with this. :( Does  
> anyone even use MOL this way? Or is Linux-under-MOL more of a toy  
> right now?

Well, linux in MOL has not really been released properly. What you need
to do is running a modified linux kernel within MOL.

While it is possible to run un unmodified linux kernel and
load mol specific drivers as kernel modules from an initrd,
it turned out this was not a very practical solution
(the source to those kernel modules are available in the ldev
BitKeeper repository).

A better solution is adding a special MOL platform to the kernel.
I have done this for 2.4, although I haven't released this code
code yet. I intend to port this code to 2.6 and try to get it into
the kernel proper.

In summary, it is quite tricky a the moment to get linux-in-MOL
working. It will be much simpler once I have put together the kernel
modifications in a releasable form.

I will try to fix this before the end of July.

/Samuel