Re: Newbie questions again...
> 2) I was told previously that drivers are compiled into Mach and I can decrease
> its size by recompiling. Great, but what happens if a) I try to wake up my ppa
> Zip drive _after_ booting, c) insert a PCMCIA card [when support will be ready]
> or c) [although not frequent, but very plausible for servers] insert new
> hardware when the system is on? How can the HURD (Mach?) Handle this?
One approach to this is to move all hardware accesses out to a library,
lets call it the "Hardware Abstraction Layer" as Microsoft does. In this
case, I believe that the microkernel's responsibility would only be to
slice up and serve the cpu. The rest of the servers on the system would
communicate with the HAL to provide the necessary services to userland.
Changes in supported devices would simply mean writing a seperate shared
library for it that plugs into the backend of the HAL, the HAL exporting a
generic and well documented interface, of course.
> 3) I feel that Linux compatibility is a major concern of the developers (true?),
> but will they be able both to exploit the full power of the system _and_ remain
> compatible?
I personally don't care all that much about Linux compatibility. It'd be
nice, but a better goal would be POSIX compatibility and forget the
idiosyncracies of other operating systems. There's plenty of room to make
our own :)
To soapbox a bit, this is the GNU OS. People should want to use it because
it's truly free on many levels. Not because it's like some other OS.
Michael Bacarella
Reply to: