Hurd/L4 as a class project

[Ivan Jager]

My friend and I are interested in doing some serious development of
L4-Hurd. L4-Hurd is a cool project, and someday I'd like to run it as
my primary OS, so I want to help. We're both competent C programmers
with some OS hacking experience, but neither of us has hacked on L4 or
Hurd before. It also happens that an OS class is giving us a nice
excuse to work on the project, the only problem is that this means
time constraints.

We're considering something along the lines of adding an IDE driver,
and possibly a network device driver, and getting L4-Hurd to run off a
filesystem on an IDE hard-drive, with the goal of being able to run more 
useful programs. Right now I don't know how hard that is. Between the two 
of us we'd be doing around 24 hours of development work a week, and we'd 
hope to have our goals met by this summer. Basically we'd like to get 
L4-Hurd running on a computer doing something useful. (Getting it to where 
it can be self hosting would be really cool.)

I'm still catching up on the current status of the project so I don't
know how much of user-land is working. It sounds like it loads a
console, and can at least run banner, but I'm assuming that
many syscalls are still unimplemented.  Also, If I understand
correctly, the device driver interface layer (deva) is still being
designed, and the server model is under debate.

So, firstly, I'm curious how people would react to a couple of newbes
working on such a project, and contributing it back to the source
tree. Secondly, I know that Mathieu Lemerre has been doing a fair
amount of work on Deva. I'm wondering if it would be better to stay
out of the way and try and work on something else, or if he could use
the help. If we want to write device drivers, first we need an
interface layer to write for.

Sorry if my understanding of the code is still a little flaky, but I'd
like to feel out the project development process as soon as possible.

P.S. We were looking into the project before the post to slashdot, if
anyone is curious, it's pure coincidence that we're posting just
after.


Mbrewer and Ivan