Hi, First disclaimer - the content of this email might have been discussed before so please bear with me. Second disclaimer - I do not argue whether GNU/Hurd should use a different kernel or not (L4 derivate or not, Viengoos or Coyotos etc) in the future.
I have been following the Hurd project for a while and find it a pretty exciting project, but sometimes I have a bit of a problem seeing where I can fit in it and where I can contribute. I would really appreciate if someone who knows Hurd and Mach intimately can comment on this. My questions are, given that we need to stick with gnumach 1.3.99 for a while: 1. What would it take to bring the device driver layer (which is from Linux 2.0 via glue code?) up to either a modern BSD or Linux 2.6 level? 2. What would it take to enable Hurd to use >1 Gb of memory 3. What would it take to enable SMP and/or NORMA-RPC? 4. What would it take to integrate a sound subsystem architecture on top of Mach? (Say OSS and then PulseAudio as a Hurd server) 5. What would it take to implement task #7050? (process-shared semaphores and mutexes) What I am looking for is a) how complex these topics are, 2) Blockers (cannot be implemented without new kernel design) I realize that all these things would perform pretty badly on the current kernel - but perhaps they will run good enough? Perhaps with a refresh of the current platform some more developer would find it interesting to participate? My motivation is very simple - I am trying to keep GNUstep compiling on GNU/Hurd. I am also interested in one day compile Etoile (GNUstep based desktop env) for Hurd. I believe that it would be really good platform. Best regards, Tim
