Testing requested for the next version of GNU Mach

[Richard Braun]

Hello,

As part of the next GNU Mach release, the physical allocator has been
completely changed in favor of a more standard buddy allocator (finally)
and the kernel allocator can service much more memory for its objects,
making kernel memory exhaustion very unlikely.

Considering we can now manage many more objects, we are once again
working towards merging the virtual memory policy patch [1]. This
attempt is also made possible by the large scalability improvements
Justus Winter contributed to the userspace file system code, in
particular in libports, libpager and libdiskfs.

Since the Debian package applies patches to the kernel, namely the 2g/2g
user/kernel split as well as the Device Driver Environment (DDE)
patches, I have prepared a branch [2] that merges all these together
for testing. I would be grateful if people could test that branch, and
in particular people with real hardware that use DDE drivers.

I'd like to thank Justus again for his durable involvement in the Hurd
project and his final Google Summer of Code participation in which he
also contributed scalability improvements (radix-tree based IPC spaces)
and bug fixes (page queue management) to the kernel.

-- 
Richard Braun

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2012-07/msg00031.html
[2] 
http://darnassus.sceen.net/gitweb/?p=rbraun/gnumach.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/vm_policy_2g_dde
    repository: git://darnassus.sceen.net/rbraun/gnumach.git
    branch: vm_policy_2g_dde