Re: Design Decisions and Hurd/L4 work (was: Re: Improving Hurd)

[Jan Atle Ramsli]

Farid Hajji wrote:
> 
> Hi Atle,
Hi, yourself :-)
> The purpose of the Hurd/L4 port is not primarily speed, but to get
> a better design of the Hurd.
.. and a stone fell from my, eh, Hard ..?

> The Hurd/L4 port forces us to rethink many design decisions that
> were valid at the time when Mach was the only available microkernel.
I'll put music to this and play it on my stereo ...

> >  but we did talk about implementing a kernel with a minimal API)
> > and it was concluded that nobody would agree to it.
> 
> Hmmm..., I'm not sure I understand what you're meaning here.
> I suggested for purely technical reasons to take the misc.
This is a long time ago, and I don't expect you to remember it, but I
sort of have your name attached to it.
I asked you if you thought it was possible that any Hurd server could be
implemented with only 5 functions.
(And yes, I said ADT, and NO! ADT is not a buzzword, and if my old
software enineering tutor got hold of the the one who said that, he
would pull him by one ear, forcing him to repeat "ADT is not a buzzword!
ADT is a fundamental concept! ADT is not ..." to the end of the street.
He would grab him by the other ear and drag him back and force him to
repeat "ADT is the way in which programs can be mathematically
justified. ADT is ..."
        (PUUH! That felt good! (what a sadist ...))
)


> 1. Port a few key drivers from OSKit to userspace.
>    We need keyboard, vga, serial(!) and, for the ambitious,
>    support for ATAPI disks (swap files etc...!).
WOW! This is has been a secret dream of mine ... 
tar cvfz /dev/raw/cd0 /home/atle/* ...
swapon kikhost:/dev/swap
swapon http://www.microsoft.com/accounting/ .. Allright. You get it. I
know.

My zip-drive has a big builtin memory buffer. Good for swap drive -
never writes to disk :-)


As for the rest of Farid's posting, there is nothing I can ask of
comment that would add anything of value.

I reserve the right to bug him privately until I get a nasty mail back
:-)

Atle