I'm interested in applying for Hurd in GSoC. I am a second year CS student in University of Oulu, Finland. I have knowledge of C to some extend, but I have never developed anything big with it on my own. On another note, I have used
non-windows operating systems only for a year, but I am eager to learn more.
What I am particularly interested in GSoC is the idea for implementing libcap for Hurd. I have managed to compile it on qemu Hurd by doing dummy patch. The
main purpose of the mentioned patch (can be found from the bottom of this mail) is to prove it is easy and possible to port libcap to Hurd. The solution I made is not most likely the elegant one possible. I do realise, that another
solution could be to change every variable type to the ones defined in stdint.h and send a patch to libcap's owner. I would love to hear more experienced people's opinions on what would be the best way to do this.
Unfortunately I have not been able to actually test libcap by using capget/ capset functions, because gcc fails to link against them. What I have gathered, they are not implemented in hurd (which is also one of the reasons why this
gsoc idea exists in the first place.) capget/capset manpage mentions "These system calls are Linux-specific."
My next plan is to study more about capabilities and about how user authentication currently works in Hurd. I also should learn somehow where
exactly should one implement the missing capabilities. Any suggestions what else should I study in order to be able to send a proper application?
From 1b5b54d1be2c3ac40a5804348861d1ac97ce4585 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Esa-Matti=20Mouruj=C3=A4rvi?= <esamatti.mourujarvi@gmail.com> Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:45:33 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Make libcap compile by using stdint.h wrapper for __u32 and __le32 types instead of linux/types.h