> Running Linux in Linux in Linux would be a great thing! I've been reading
>reports about how IBM's older mainframes worked and specifically about the
>architecture of VM/DOS. Apparently they had a virtual machine which the OS ran
>in, the VM provided file access and linear memory to the OS.
I did a lot of work on that system, called VM. There was a control
program (CP) which ran virtual machines. It was all written in S/370
assembler and was about 300K lines of code (VM and the user interface
called CMS which had a file system, an exec language, and little else).
Of course that excludes compilers, etc.
Most of the work was a detailed simulation of memory and I/O. S/370 I/O
is complex, involving channel programs (you don't want to know). It also
simulated privileged instructions. The result was sufficient to run VM
under VM, which was a marvelous development environment. Imagine single
stepping, breakpointing, etc at the kernel level.
A big project to duplicate. Incidently, VM still exists and is being
enhanced even today.
john alvord