Re: Improving Hurd

[Jeroen Dekkers]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 07:46:10PM +0200, Jan Atle Ramsli wrote:
> "Alfred M. Szmidt" wrote:
> > 
> > * Jan Atle Ramsli writes:
> >
> > > I think you may find that this will improve with the change from
> > > Mach to L4.  But imagine if the first year had been used to analyze
> > > and specify it.
> > 
> > Why? The Hurd is not Mach, or L4, it is just a bunch of translators and is
> > quite independent of Mach. Yes, we do use drivers and such from it, but I
> > don't see why it would change anything if we change to L4.  Sure, we might
> > get some speed, but until I see some numbers that the Hurd runs faster
> > on L4 I won't believe it. :)
> 
> Well, now you are at center of the what I think is the problem.
> Who says either of Mach or L4 is even suitable for this purpose?
> There was a possibility of a total 'Faridization' of the whole thing 
> (sorry, Farid, 
>       (you can imagine how many dinner parties I get invited to) 
>   I don't even know if you remember it, 
>  but we did talk about implementing a kernel with a minimal API)
> and it was concluded that nobody would agree to it.

I think that L4 has a minimal API. Other than that, if your solutions
is good and you have good argumentation, I'm sure you can convince us.
 
> > And Neal is correct that it is a non-trivial thing, I believe that Roland
> > or Thomas are working on this right now.  If this had been a trivial fix
> > it would have been fixed a long time ago.
> To me the word 'trivial' covers more than a 'fix', it includes
> implementing a driver, but
> _only_ if the device is well documented.

To remove the 1 GB limitation you have to rewrite big parts of
ext2fs. This means that you have to know a lot of internals. Those
internals are well documented in the comments of the source
code. Other than that you are welcome to document it.

> One of my very first programming tasks was building a driver for a
> graphics device, in 1986!

That's nice. It's seems you have a lot of experience. Why didn't you
write anything for the Hurd yet?
 
> > 
> > PS,
> > I hope that I didn't sound to flame-ish. =)
> That is really not so important. Not now. What is imprtant now, is what
> is being said, not so much how it is said.
> Had I not let my evil tounge get the better of me, I would not have been
> incited to .. well, u&r.
> Right now, the Hurd is finally starting to move away from the
> water-hole, I don't hear the thunder of 1.84467e+19 hoofs yet, but I
> hear whips cracking.

The Hurd is getting better, that means that more and more people are
going to develop/use/promote it, which results that the Hurd gets
betters, what means that... ah I guess you get my point. I think the
development can go pretty fast if we actually have the things
developers want.

Jeroen Dekkers
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