Re: Booting the Hurd ?
On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 05:16:22PM +0200, Yann Forget wrote:
> The statement by Linus 10 years back is still valid. What
> the purpose to have a new design, a micro-kernel and
> whatever if it is not even remotely useable ? Developpers
> have managed to compile half of Debian packages, but
> they did not even think to provide a way to boot it !
"Nobody has ever booted the Hurd. We just cross compile.
Nobody here has ever seen the Hurd running, because it is completely vapor
ware.
We do this to trick people into trying out the Hurd and give them a bad
day."
So you could think. But it is not the case. How about a bug report, with
factual data what you did and what happened? There is a plethora of common
pitfalls, and even if you did everything right, hardware conflicts could
explain a lot of other trouble. But we will never know until you help us to
help you and provide us with a report that contains more fact than opinion.
That is only useful though if you are interested in developing the Hurd, or
otherwise promoting it. Comparing our development effort with the GNU/Linux
distributions from 2002 just isn't fair, especially if you don't take into
account the resources that are available and go into each (which are millions
of dollars and thousands of people on the one hand, and a handful bucks to
nothing and a few determined individuals on the other hand).
Here is another hint: The Hurd is not primarly about device drivers.
All device driver developers seem to have found their place in
Linux or other kernel projects which focus on device drivers. We will
improve this in the future by using a more uptodate and better developed
device driver framework, OSKit (and possibly L4env if it becomes available
and we use L4). This would be a lot easier if Linux developers would be
interested in writing reusable and shareable code, too.
As a consequence, the Hurd is much more picky about hardware than desirable.
Things like IRQ sharing are not supported.
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
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