Re: Minimal Hurd

[Roland McGrath]

> I'm working to try to get the Hurd running on the L4 microkernel. What
> is required for a minimal Hurd system?

For bootstrap testing, all you need is what's in the hurd package itself,
and what's in glibc.  There is a trivial shell "/bin/shd" in
hurd/utils/shd.c that you can use to run simple commands.  

The next thing you'd want is fileutils, so you can test that the filesystem
is working and test out settrans and so forth.

In my experience that stuff is pretty easy.  Getting bash to work is more
of a pain (just because it uses more features of the system and expects
them to work right), and from there you can start to bootstrap and the rest
is just nits.

As to the actual path of minimal Hurd bootstrapping, step one is to fully
grok the bootstrapping sequence of the Hurd booted from Mach.  Aside from
the question of where your device drivers come from, it should be about the
same for L4 I would think.  The procedure is basically the same when booted
via `boot' from another system on top of the microkernel.  If you are
booting from l4linux or something then you'll want a version of `boot' that
can run on your host system.