Getting Started with Hurd-L4

[Sam Mason]

Hi,

Just found the Hurd project again, after forgetting about it for two
or three years - things seem to have changed a bit!

I grabbed CVS versions of hurd-l4 and pistachio and after a
bit of work managed to get them built.  I had to change the
"DEFAULT_INCLUDES" variable in the "laden", "wortel", "physmem"
and "task" makefiles to also look in "$(top_builddir)/include" and
"$(top_builddir)/libc-parts".  It was a bit of a fiddle to work out
what was wrong, as the compiler was pulling in the system's headers
and the resulting errors masked the problem a bit.  I would send
a patch, as they generally make more sense to read, but I guess I
should be changing the "Makefile.am" files and I'm not much of a
autoconf guru and I couldn't see any references to the flags in them.

Everything seemed to run OK in Bochs; I can put in some printfs and
get output where I expect.  I've had a look at the TODO list and
it all looks suitably low level!  I was wondering how much of it
needs to be done before the more normal userland stuff starts to get
written (by this I don't mean I want a shell, that's obviously going
to be a while) like working out a prototype initalisation procedure.
Is this all pretty much dictated by the existing Hurd artcheture,
or have we got a reasonably clean slate to work from.

Hope that makes sense,
  Sam