Re: Hurd queries
On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 09:32:00AM +0300, Ognyan Kulev wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 08:03:15PM +0100, Bob Ham wrote:
> > I've a few quesitons about the Hurd that I was hoping could have some
> > light shed on them: firstly, has any thought been put into how sound
> > will be handled? If not, does anybody know if it would be possible to
> > port OSS/Lite or ALSA to the Hurd?
>
> AFAIK There isn't any code for sound yet. If you have desire you can write
> a sound layer and send patches for GNUMach and/or Hurd to bug-hurd@gnu.org.
The problem with sound is that those little sound devices are character
rather than block, and we have nicer a glue layer in GNU Mach nor the
libchannel abstraction yet. However, adding a simple glue layer for
character devices (read: not terminals) is not so hard, and there are
patches by Okuji and me floating around at alpha.gnu.org, so I think it is
possible to add OSS/lite and hack some simple translators (based on the
stream translator we use for klog) to access them.
ALSA is based on linux modules technology, so it is harder to port that.
In the Hurd, there are probably very smart things possible to get sound
right, but I'd say to get proper sound output in user space you'd need
some real time components in the kernel (RTMach?).
> > Is there going to be a Hurd TCP/IP stack developed? I know pfinet was
> > carved out of Linux, and there's a 'newpfinet' directory in the hurd CVS
> > repository (even though it's empty.)
>
> pfinet is TCP/IP stack, isn't it? But it is tightly integrated with
> ethernet layer,
Well, the ethernet driver is in GNUMach, and we access the gnumach device to
fetch and push the raw packets. It's all in pfinet/ethernet.c, and very
simple.
> e.g. there is no PPP support yet.
I take the position that we have PPP support, but it is broken. The user
space ppp software needs to be debugged. That's all. No new code to be
written, no extensive porting. Just fixing the bugs. Anyone?
> GGI was mentioned in mailing lists a time ago with the same in mind: as an
> alternative of X.
Mostly as something sane for our console, as I have it in mind (KGI etc).
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
Reply to: