Re: Niches for the Hurd: evaluation method; was: DRM musings, capabilities and stuff

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:09:19PM +0100, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> 2008/12/12  <olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net>:

> I see that the EROS or Coyotos as a whole does not fit the
> requirements of a GNU system but I think reusing some basic parts is
> no worse than using any other kernel.

Well, if we don't use the constructor mechanism, the persistence/storage
mechanism, the resource management, nor the IPC: Which parts of Coyotos
exactly would we use?...

(Viengoos presently (mis)uses some parts of L4 as a hardware
abstraction. This is about as much as it could use from Coyotos -- only
that L4 is much better in this regard. It existed for years, and can be
considered pretty mature by now. And it is more minimalistic, making it
easier to use only the hardware abstraction, ignoring all the parts we
don't need.)

> DRM is just a security policy that can be built on top of any security
> that is actually usable.

Only if you assume that "security that is actually usable" implies
hiding things from the parent process. As I already explained, we
believe this assumption to be fundamentally wrong. Get over it.

> > Presently nearly 60% of all Debian source packages (that is more
> > than 4600 packages) build on the Hurd -- and most of them actually
> > work.
[...]
> And how many of them use any Hurd specific features? If all you want
> is the application compiling and running on the system then you can do
> that on any system that provides POSIX compatibility in one way or
> another.

First of all, users can make use of Hurd features in many cases
*without* applications using them explicitely -- in fact, most of the
things mentioned in this thread (before you turned it into Hurd bashing)
fall into this category.

Also, being able to run the majority of existing applications unchanged,
and running some applications that make use of the additional features,
is not at all mutually exclusive.

Everything that was said about a POSIX layer for Coyotos (or a
Coyotos-like ngHurd) implies a distinct POSIX environment, which allows
running existing applications in some kind of jail, pretty much isolated
from the "native" environment with new applications. This is not
acceptable IMHO. The Hurd allows running traditional and new
applications *in the same environment*. This is what makes it attractive
to me.

-antrik-