Re: Looking for a project
Hi Ali,
> Do you guys have any suggestions? anything that would be really useful
> that you don't have yet? (apart from ppp ;-). pthreads?
iff you're looking for something _really_ challenging, you may be interested
in helping to port the Hurd to L4. Mach is really an outdated microkernel
that is too heavy-weight and not very performent. L4 on the contrary is
much smaller and extremely efficient. If you're intersted, I can point you
to some resources. Some people are currently thinking about a L4 port but
we need more helpers right now! L4 is located at http://www.l4ka.org/
Of course, there are other more pressing projects for the Hurd: Besides
the ports of user-level ppp and X11 which are being worked on right now,
help would be appreciated in the oskit-mach branch.
Personally, I'd also welcome the port of some FreeBSD features to the
way too Linux-centric Debian Hurd distribution. I'm thinking here of
FreeBSD's excellent /usr/ports system, but probably also of its release
management structure and even maybe its libc.
Another project may be adding binary compatibility mode to the Hurd.
Just like the "linuxulator" under FreeBSD, which redirects syscalls of
Linux binaries into linux emulation libraries, thus enabling FreeBSD
users to run linux binaries unchanged, something similar can be done
in the Hurd. There are two ways to do this:
1. The easy way is to add missing features to glibc, and rely on the fact,
that Linux binaries are mostly dynamically linked against the same glibc ABI.
2. The hard (?) way is to add a system call redirector in Mach, which traps
Linux- and other OS's syscalls and sends them as IPC to an emulation library.
I can update you on both approaches if you are interested.
Regards,
-Farid.
--
Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Admin | Phone: +49-2131-67-555
Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany | farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net
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Murphy's Law fails only when you try to demonstrate it, and thus succeeds.
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