Portable vkernel (emulator)

[Michael Neumann <mneumann@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

IMHO, Hammer is the killer-feature of DragonFly, too sad that I can't
use it on another system until it gets ported. I'd of course love to run
a native DragonFly on my laptop (I'm planning to do soon), but there is
still some unsupported hardware etc.

So instead of porting Hammer to other systems, wouldn't it be easier to
write a vkernel emulator that can run on *BSD and/or Linux (or even
Windoze)? I mean, it's just a user process, isn't it? How much effort
would it be to implement such an emulator for say FreeBSD? Is there any
possibility to run everything as a user process (like qemu), so no
extensions to the operating system must be done (kind of intercepting
the syscalls of the vkernel)?

Even if it might be super inefficient, it would be super cool to be able
to run a vkernel, which runs hammer, which runs samba, which serves as
fileserver for windoze ;-)
(or FreeBSD -> vkernel -> hammer -> nfs -> FreeBSD :)

The main issue that I want to solve is to be able to use Hammer even
while travelling around. At home, I can access my files over NFS/Samba.
But when being on the move, I'd like to access my files via a Hammer
slave filesystem, but therefore I need DragonFly installed (okay can do
that with qemu already...).

Regards,

  Michael