Re: project died?

[OKUJI Yoshinori]

From: Farid Hajji <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: project died?
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 19:33:48 +0100

> There were some useful comments and suggestions that
> could be used as a starting point, but at least the
> following problems stopped us. I guess that there
> will be no progress here, until these problems are
> solved:

I completely agree with you. That's the same reason why I didn't try
to port Hurd onto L4 when I thought of the idea. To port Hurd to
another microkernel, we need to resolve the portability problems in
Hurd itself. It is impossible to port Hurd onto L4 quickly, without
improving the Hurd itself.

>    At a first shot, a libpthreads that maps user-level
>    threads to kernel-threads 1:1 would be sufficient
>    to get started, but due to the severe limitations
>    of L4 on the number of threads per task and the
>    proliferous use of threads in the Hurd, we'll need
>    an n:m (n >= m) mapping anyway very soon.

Maybe you are right, but I doubt if Hurd really needs so many
threads. Clearly, too many threads just degrade the performance, so I
sometimes consider limiting the maximum number of threads per server
rather than permitting each server to have an arbitary number of
threads.

> 4. There were some toughts about gcc specs, to get
>    started, but I'm not aware of any progress there.

This is important in the long run, but this is not essential to start
up the project.

>    To overcome this situation, I started (privatly) by
>    ripping glibc apart, moving the mach sysdeps into a
>    separate libmachemu.a and the hurd sysdeps into a
>    libhurd.a library. The rest of glibc looks very portable
>    and can be replaced by other vanilla C libraries,
>    e.g. OSKit's.

That's a good idea. I'd recommend discussing that with Roland and
Mark, before completing your work.

Okuji