Re: HURD kernel change
On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 04:04:36PM -0400, ddavies@ddavies.net wrote:
> Is there really a plan to stablize GNUmach 2.0?
Well, let's look at it this way. How long will it take to port the Hurd to
L4? Probably a long time, with the current pace. However, there are
several people working on it, and of course it would be good to have more.
But note that helping with the port to L4 means that you have to become an
expert on an issue and be able to work independently of others (also because
not everything about the design is finished yet).
Getting GNU Mach 2.0 to work reasonably well is probably not a lot of work
(compared to the L4 port), if you are determined and know what you do.
The set of problems is reasonably defined (mostly oskit integration in
GNU Mach), and so it is a much smaller problem. Also there are people who
at least theoretically could tell you what's the way to go (ie, what the
design criteria are, and if a change is correct). However, nobody of the
core developers is working on this, so you'd still have to work on your own.
It's something that has the potential to give reasonable results in a short
time frame.
> At least on the hardware I'm using now there are just too many hard to
> reproduce or just plain wacky bugs to try to fix them without being
> able to ask if others experience the problems too.
Uhm, if you see bugs, then you can fix bugs! The problem is if you can't
reproduce a bug :)
> If anyone is still interested in this, I'd like to get an idea of how
> stable 2.0 (1.9) is for you. Mine has never stayed up more than a
> couple of hours (at most and it was idle at that). It just seems to
> randomly reset and then the machine boots again. This is under remote
> debugging, without debugging it crashes during init server startup and
> resets.
That's of course not so good. If it is not possible to stabilize it, it
might be a dead end.
In the end, you decide how you spend your time. If GNU Mach 2 can be made
to work better than GNU Mach 1, certainly that would be a usability boost (I
am thinking of random device, Wagi's serial device drivers, etc).
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
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