Re: L4-hurd digest, Vol 1 #72 - 4 msgs

[Farid Hajji]

Hi Zeno,

> Hello everybody out there, I am back from vacation now.
> As some of you know, I've followed this list for some time
> and wrote HTML page (on the GNU web server) about it.
> If there is work to do, like writing web pages, docs,
> creating project sites at sourceforge, I am willing to do
> that. (I've already started to revise l4-hurd.html and to
> integrate the TODO list)
if you could help here, that would be great!

> I offer this because I don't feel competent enough to
> start some real hacking with L4.
> atm I read the docs/sources of oskit, glibc and the Hurd.
> I've installed these systems, plus L4Ka and ChacmOS and
> played a little bit with them.
> I have read all L4 docs/theses that describe the concept
> and the philosophy of the system, but none of the 'hard stuff',
> like man pages and sources.
As far as I see, you've done more than most of us on l4-hurd ;-).
Seriously though, we are all very new to L4 hacking, so learning
by doing is not a shame at all. Just get your hands dirty by
writing some simple root tasks. It's not that difficult (yet).
The more you hack in the L4 environment, the easier things
will become. Sure, basic understanding of low-level programming
with C would be very useful, because the L4 APIs don't yet hide
the bit-manipulating stuff e.g. in IPCs etc. You'll need
C bit-manipulation skills to read the L4 headers as well ;-).

The hacking projects on the TODO list are more demanding (of course!),
but no-one is required to do them alone. We just need someone to start
writing a few files and place them in CVS. I'll hope (no, I _expect_)
that extensions and patches will quickly come in, as we have some
L4 and Mach/Hurd lurkers here on l4-hurd (right?).

> I am also reading a German book about Mach:
> Christoph Zimmermann/Albrecht Kraas: Mach. Konzepte und Programmierung.
I didn't read Zimmermann/Kraas yet. Could you briefly describe it?
Does it cover Mach 3.0 and higher? The only introductory book about
Mach that I know is Boykin et. al., which is very outdated, because
it covered Mach 2.5. Newbies to Mach had no choice but to grok
the canonical OSF/Opengroup docs (*sigh*). If Zimmermann/Kraas
is worth it, we could try to persuade their editor/publisher to provide
an english version? ;-).

> I hope to start some more practical work the next weeks but I
> don't know how much time I'll have, as the winter term starts on
> Monday.
_Every_ contribution is highly welcome!

cu,

-Farid.

-- 
Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Admin | Phone: +49-2131-67-555
Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany  | address@hidden
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