Re: Improving Hurd

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 04:31:15PM +0200, Jan Atle Ramsli wrote:
> I do not want to hijack the Hurd for my own dark purposes.
> I am 42 years old, I am not looking impress the girls.

Hey, but ... it works! :)
 
> I try to find a way to contribute.

The best way to get into the Hurd for an experienced programmer is probably
to read the interface definition files in the Hurd source code:
hurd/*.defs

Those files define what I think you mean with strategy.  They are the Hurd
server interfaces used by the C library to implement the POSIX interface,
and that is used among the Hurd servers to implement the Hurd (d'oh).

A good start is hurd/auth.defs, which defines the Hurd authentication model.
Then you can go on with whatever you are interested in.  file interface in
fs.defs, I/O interface in io.defs etc.  Lot's of interesting stuff, and the
implementation is in the various Hurd servers (we recommend use of TAGS so
you can browse quickly around the source code).

The documentation is incomplete, but it's better than in some other big
projects, so you should have a reasonable head start.  Of course you should
look around for the Mach books (kernel principles, kernel interface, server
writer) which help with the details of the RPC interface.

You need the sources of the Hurd and the C library at least, but gnumach is
also useful.  Which brings me to the interrupt stuff.  Hardware access is
close to how it is in other kernels, like Linux or BSD, at least in gnumach. 
In oskit-mach it is mostly encapsulated by OSKit.  In anyway, if that's what
you are interested in you should look into OSKit.  We need your help!  A lot
of drivers are missing in OSKit, and people experienced in driver
development can help integrating Linux or BSD drivers into the OSKit, so we
can make use of them.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de