L4 meets the Hurd at the Congress in Berlin

[Moritz Schulte]

Hi there,

the CCC congress was fun for me, I hope for the others, too.  Not only
that there were some Hurd people, but also two L4 hackers from
Karlsruhe.  Neal had his really nice talk on the Hurd and after that
the L4 people talked spontaneouslly a bit about L4.

Jeroen and me tried to summarize the Hurd/L4 related points a bit.

o Horst Wenske, an active L4 hacker who seems to be interested in the
  Hurd, wants to tell some other L4 people about the Hurd and tries to
  promote it a bit there.  He also suggested to make a list of Hurd/L4
  related subjects he could propose for theses at his university.  See
  the "Student projects" at http://www.research.ibm.com/sawmill/ as an
  example of what he means.  Right now they are still doing research
  on SawMill, which is dead, the Hurd is not.  That would be a big
  advantage for the Hurd, since we are usually volunteers, they would
  work fulltime on such projects.  Since SawMill is dead, the Hurd
  would be a better system for them to try out their nice microkernel.

o He wants to convince the IDL4 hacker to release it.

o We need to know how the new L4 API will look like, perhaps it would
  make things easier for the port.  The L4 API is still evolving and
  won't stop doing so in the near future.  But all L4 kernels are at
  least backwards compatible.

o He wants to convince the SawMill people to open the source (SawMill
  is a multi-server OS running on top of L4).  Perhaps that could be
  helpful since that OS is quite similar to the Hurd, he said.

o ChacmOS is a very simple free OS built on top of L4, we could have a
  look at that, too.  You can find it at
  http://www.l4ka.org/projects/ChacmOS.

                moritz
-- 
moritz@duesseldorf.ccc.de - http://duesseldorf.ccc.de/~moritz/
GPG fingerprint = 3A14 3923 15BE FD57 FC06  B501 0841 2D7B 6F98 4199