Curious - How much of Hurd depends on Mach?
Hi list.
Sorry, I haven't had much time to Hurd-hack lately. After
coding all day at work I just want to blast some monsters and
read some Slashdot at home right now. I must say that using
the QuakeForge OpenGL client with Quake Team Fortress
and MegaTF is very fun! Who needs Half-Life TFC :-)
I'm still interested in Mach SMP support, but the engineer
in me wants to take it a step further. Remember those nifty
old i860 transputer cards you could plug into your slots and
build a transputer hypercube system? Imagine filling all of
your free PCI slots with old Voodoo Banshee's or such and
using their GPU's not for graphics but for vector crunching
and other weird stuff. I think it would be wild if Hurd could
be made to support alien coprocessor daughterboards such
as G4 cards etc. I think Hurd is ideal for this type of thing.
In researching Mach and its connections with Hurd, I am
curious as to exactly how much really depends on Mach
at this time... is it just the core Hurd servers, like it should
be, or are there cheating packages that use x386 assembly
and call Mach functions directly? I'm concerned here with
just the apps which are not part of Hurd-core.
Also, this is unrelated, but I might as well post it all in one
message, can we learn anything from QNX? They appear
to have built their own Hurd with their own nanokernel.
I wish they would GPL their stuff as we could really benefit
from their technology. Their system is architecturally very
similar to Hurd, is a real-time OS, and purportedly has
exceptional performance. I tried the QNX demo boot
disk several years ago and it was certainly impressive for
it's gee-whiz factor if anything else.
I really should get to some Hurd-hacking, but the weather
has finally warmed up enough here in Pennsylvania that I'm
going camping all weekend! Yaay... first camp of the year.
Tomorrow I shall be toasting sausages over the cheery fire
and chugging down brews with much enthusiasm!
BTW: www.ebgames.com still has all Loki games for $9.99
super bargain! I bought five of `em! Support non-Windows!
Cheers!
- Doug
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