Re: mach, mklinux, uml, and darwin.

[Niels Möller]

"Troy Truchon" <truchon@ncinternet.net> writes:

> In theory could one run linux and/or BSD on top of the mach kernel
> alongside the hurd?

Yes. At least in theory.

> It would make it a lot easier if I could run GNU/linux while
> gradually learning/using/playing with the hurd.

I don't know how mklinux, bsd or darwin boots. But for the Hurd, I
think it works like this: if you have something like mklinux running,
you need to do two things to boot the hurd and run it in parallell:

  1. Make sure that you use some version of Mach that both mklinux and
     the Hurd is happy with. May require porting work on either
     mklinux or the Hurd.

  2. Port the Hurd program "boot" to mklinux.

Then boot the Hurd in the same way as you would start a sub-hurd under
the Hurd. Don't know if it's worth the effort to try to get that
working, but it would be pretty cool. And if you do, you would only
get two independent operating systems running at the same time. It
would take more effort if you'd want them to for example share some
filesystem.

Booting the Hurd from a different operating system was the normal way
to boot it done during early hurd development (i.e. before Hurd-0.1),
I think. At that time the development environment was some BSD-variant
running on top of Mach.

Regards,
/Niels