Re: Tasks list for GNU Mach

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   That depends on your definition of what a new microkernel is.  If
   the changes you need to make are very fundamental, the result is
   arguably a new microkernel.

New in the sense: Drop GNU Mach, use something else.  Changing GNU
Mach to suit our needs so that it becomes vastly different is not new
in my book; since it will still be GNU Mach.

   The current Hurd (on Mach) is not in that state yet, missing too
   many drivers (in particular usb and sound drivers).

Something that the people who work on the new fork have reaptedly said
that they will ignore.  Actually, Mach doesn't miss any drivers, NIC
drivers are trivial to port, so are SCSI drivers, what it misses is
the framework to make those missing _sets_ of drivers work, and I'm
not even refering to kernel support here, but libraries like
libchannel so that those things can be used.  I think that even OSKit
has some support for sound and USB drivers, so it would only require
to hook in whatever functions are needed for that.

If people find drivers important, then these people should step up and
start writting say libchannel, and then writting a simple driver for
sound or USB.  After that one can worry about chipsets.