Re: Status of Hurd on Alpha?

[Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com>]

> I have now acces to an Alpha 164SX system, and would like to know if
> it would be possible to have a Hurd based GNU/Linux running on it. I
> know the Mach kernel should be easy to port in theory...

There already exists somewhere an Alpha port of Mach, I think it was done
at CMU.  The first step would be to track that down, get it running, and
integrate it with our gnumach source tree.

Porting the rest of the Hurd consists primarily of porting GNU libc.  Since
libc already runs on Linux/Alpha, the purely machine-specific work is
already done and all that should remain is the really fun magic like
signals.  That may bend your brain, but I will be more than happy to help
with it when the time comes.

The other problem is that there is likely some code in the Hurd that is not
64-bit clean, because it hasn't run on a 64-bit machine.  There will
probably be some bugs there, but nothing conceptually complex.

I seem to vaguely recall someone working on 64-bit cleanliness before.
Maybe it was Kazumoto Kojima <kkojima@kk.info.kanagawa-u.ac.jp>, who was
working on a MIPS port at one point.

BTW, for messages about things like this (i.e. real deep Hurd hacking, not
only distribution/installation issues), please send your messages to
bug-hurd@gnu.org or help-hurd@gnu.org as well as debian-hurd.  The
debian-hurd@lists.debian.org list is really primarily for people with
Debian clues to talk about Hurd things in trying to build Debian/Hurd
packages.  bug-hurd/help-hurd is the place for core Hurd development stuff.


Thanks,
Roland