Re: Redesigning the Hurd form scartch? (was: Re: Mach emulation)

[Niels Möller]

Farid Hajji <address@hidden> writes:

> Why not redesign/reimplement the Hurd from scratch in a bottom up
> manner, building the new libmom along the way?

I won't argue this, as I'm not actually hacking the Hurd.

> Other servers that come to mind are filesystem translators like
> ext2fs and ufs. They too could run on top of an existing guestos,
> using raw partitions through generic read(2)/write(2)/... posix
> calls (that will have to be added to libmom).

But this seems completely backwards, in two ways:

1. Hurd ext2fs does *not* access any raw partitions. It uses ipc to
   communicate with a "store" (which is often a translator attached to
   /dev/something, which in turn uses a Mach device to access a
   partition). To move to L4, one should port the translator providing
   raw access to a partition; ext2fs should not need anything more
   than a recompile. One also needs to port libstore.

2. Adding posix-style calls to libmom seems contrary to everything you
   have said about "libmom" earlier.

Regards,
/Niels