Re: Hurd on Minix3 or other kernels?

[B. Douglas Hilton]

Mike Small wrote:

> ...
>
> I'm not qualified to judge the merits of this (although doesn't minix
> lack paging?) but it sounds like fun.  Please let me know or make it
> known on one of the Hurd lists if you take up this project and need
> testers or other beginning programmers.  I've been intending to try to
> port Hurd/GNU Mach to my powermac (or Hurd/L4, but that seemed
> unlikely to be within my capabilities - excuse the pun - anytime soon)
> for some time, but agree with you that minix might be a better
> starting point for a novice.
>  
I've been thinking about what I wrote above, and one kind of nice thing 
is that it should be possible to bootstrap the Minix3/Hurd system by 
compling from with a chrooted environment. I built a Gentoo system from 
within a Debian xterm by doing this kind of trickery. For instance, you 
could set up some build space, unpack your Hurdish binutils, and attempt 
to compile them using the Minix compiler. Once they are built, use them 
to attempt to compile glibc0 or other low-level things.

Since Minix is bootable, has a clib, and a compiler, a bit of iterative 
bootstrap compiling in a chrooted environment might be worth checking 
out. At the moment all four of my primary partitions are filled, so I 
can't install Minix3 to fool around with it, but perhaps with a bit of 
carefull hard drive juggling I could free up a primary for this purpose. 
If any of you know a way to install Minix3 into a secondary and boot it 
with GRUB, then do please spill the beans because I have a couple nice 
chunks of freespace in my extended partition.

-D

(ps: yes I'm posting from windoze, hence the virus scan stamp. Rest 
assured I have a rocking Gentoo sys, I'm just playing a game here right 
now :-)


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