Hurd on Minix3 or other kernels?

[B. Douglas Hilton]

Hi all. I'm a long-time lurker here and used to do a bit of high-level 
porting and tinkering on the old Gnumach/Hurd. I tried to help debug the 
OSkit/Mach kernel, mostly without much success, as unfortunately I'm not 
really very knowledgeable about kernel level programming.

It was always my hope that Hurd would become more microkernel neutral 
than really specified for one in particular. Look at the problems 
getting Mach unhooked for instance.

A while back, when I was reading about the recent release of Minix3, I 
had this probably stupid thought that porting the Hurd to the Minix3 
kernel might be advantageous for academic purposes at least. I realize 
that the L4/Hurd effort is sailing into some extremely advanced areas 
and is all about fixing the performance and other problems stemming 
mostly from the Mach legacy, and thats cool, but it looks like the 
usability horizon for L4/Hurd is speeding away into the future.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I would really like to see an 
"academic version of Hurd" with a well documented and somewhat 
understandable kernel for laymen like myself. Mach seemed to me like it 
was terribly convoluted, and I even purchased a book on Mach System 
Programming in an attempt to get a handle on what was going on. I spent 
a fair amount of time poking around in OSkit/Mach 's guts and never 
really got to where I had much of a clue as to what was really 
happening. I believe that the Minix3 kernel would be suitable 
license-wise and that Dr. Tannenbaum probably wouldn't mind if somebody 
tried to build a Hurd userland against his microkernel. In any event, 
the Minix3 kernel could be presumed to be relatively stable, somewhat 
recent, reasonably well supplied with hardware drivers, moderately well 
performing, and most importantly well documented and written with 
students of computer science in mind.

Is there any merit to my idea of trying to fork a branch of Hurd over to 
something like Minix3 just for mainly academic purposes? I realize that 
it wouldn't be cutting edge or anything, but I'm lucky I can still even 
boot Gnumach/Hurd on my new(ish) system, most people won't be able to 
even do that soon. I think a lot of interested student types could 
potentially benefit if it were possible. I know that MIG is deeply 
intertwined with the Hurd userland and I really don't have a clue as to 
what would be involved in creating a MIG-like tool for the Minix3 
microkernel, but I assume it would not be easy.

My apologies for being slightly off-topic from L4-Hurd, but since all 
the discussion about microkernels lately, I thought I'd add my two cents 
and see what the rest of you all thought. I know there are a lot of  
people like myself who would like to be more involved with L4/Hurd but 
are really in way over their heads with the current state of affairs and 
can't really make much meaningful contribution at the present time (and 
near future).

Cheers!
B. Douglas Hilton
Mechanical Engineer


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