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Re: Where's Grub?



 
> > Just installed Hurd using the cross-install script which
> > is broken, btw. Now, I cannot find grub. All the links from
> > the web pages are dead.
> 
> ui. Gordon will tell you more, but it is on 
> 
> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hurd/
> 
> browse a bit. There is more useful stuff. IIRC, grub is in boot/ and src/ or
> so.
> 
> > Btw, anyone working on a GGI port
> > to Hurd? :)
> 
> Not yet. We are lacking POSIX threads, so performance will be a bit... mmh.
> However, I am sure Aaron will want to try it as soon as I got the native
> development environment working (which is mostly done).

I thoughtplayed taking this up all day yesterday, actually. The only thing
holding me off is that I figured it'd be better to wait for your
development environment. Anywho, these were going to be asked anyway, so
I'll just toss them here now. Don't eat me.


HURD VIDEO SUPPORT! How? When? What?

I assume we're going with GGI as the "smiled upon" fresh out of the
tar/deb setup for video because it's well supported (XFree86, Berlin, and
a whole bunch of other OSes) and seemingly well developed.

The question is how will the HURD host GGI? or more importantly,  video in
general? My ideas here (which I've suggested to some people individually)
are that the HURD should have a video server that GGI and other happy
video schemes can hook in to. I'm happy with this idea but I've not seen
many reliable real-world examples of this being done. I know
Windows NT did it for awhile, but that doesn't meet my standards of
"reliable". NT isn't a full microkernel and Microsoft isn't a full bag of
marbles. I'll find (or be told) what BeOS does.

Others suggest to me that it should be hacked into GNUMach. That works,
but I don't like how it leaves us (sorry I didn't take it up with you
guys directly, I feel it'd be more productive out in the open). The HURD
will need to be hacked to work with other MKs that don't support video
schemes, and it endangers the MK itself. Out of all of the system level
services that are in the median, it seems that video is the greatest
source of problems. (My Linux system, for example, only "crashes" because
of either SVGAlib or XFree86. This isn't a direct correlation to video
access schemes, but it does lead me to believe it's somewhat responsible
and I don't feel like speculating on why because we all probably know
why).

There are plenty of other dis/advantages to each approach, but I'll leave
it at that (for now!).

My guess is that it'll be a compromise between the two. I really would
like to get this settled early because it'll give me (and others) 
something to do now so I can say "look, I did this, I'm not useless!"
which is great for my morale. :)

All in all, I'm going to wait for the development snapshot before I start
codesmithing anything. I'll be happy to contribute to both pthreads and
ggi in the future.

--Michael Bacarella




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