Re: Hurd on Mach on GNU/Linux (verion 0.0.0)

[John Tobey]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 09:40:50AM +0100, Farid Hajji wrote:
> Wow, I'm truly impressed! I didn't yet download nor tried it, but

Impressed by my insanity, you mean. ;)

> will do so on my development NetBSD/x86 box, just to be sure that it
> really is POSIXish enough for my needs ;) As you've correctly guessed,
> you're not the only one interested in a user-land mach emulation that
> permits hacking on the Hurd inside a POSIX (restricted to x86-platforms)
> system. [I hate frequent rebootings too ;-)]

I'm glad you're interested.  For the benefit of l4-hurd readers, let
me reiterate that the linked-to code does not do anything remotely
useful, it's there for informational purposes only.  If/when I get
something that I think is "portable" to other people's i386-Linux
machines, I will announce a 0.1.

> So VK will need to provide a sufficiently small subset of Mach to be
> useful at all. This involves changing the Hurd sources to use less mach-
> specific things that will not be present in VK. We're currently in
> the process of assessing the Hurd requirements of such a VK and of
> means to implement VK/L4. Once the set of VK syscalls stabilizes,
> VK/POSIX (and most likely VK/Mach) could be rather quickly implemented.
> Then, the Hurd sources will need to be modified to use only this
> stable set of VK syscalls. Such hacking could be effectively done
> either on Hurd/VK/Mach or Hurd/VK/POSIX, the latter being what John
> is intending with gnumach-otop right now.

I definitely intend to hack with it.  One potential problem for using
my work (assuming it becomes usable) in an effort to port the Hurd to
L4 is that I am prefering Linux dependency to x86 dependency where I
have such a choice.  However, I aim to keep both kinds to a minimum
without needing to recompile userland Hurd code.

Cheers,
-John

-- 
John Tobey <jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org>