Work on hurd-l4 and a simplefs

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo]

Hello, folks.

It's been a long time since I've got interested in client/server
operating systems, and got an eye over L4 and found out people
were willing to port Hurd to it.
Unfortunately, all I could see was lots of planning and no code.
Lately, I've found Marcus Brinkmann code on Savannah (in fact,
it was this weekend). Since then, I've been checking the code.

Since I'm taking an OS course at uni I should get a paper
and implementation done and since then, I've started to work
on a simple dummy toy OS over L4. It already loads ELF modules,
starts them and some other threads linked to the roottask I've
written. I've even experienced with the pingpong thing using
two ELF binaries started by roottask.

Since I must handle this paper in soon time, I was thinking
about doing some fast job and forgetting about task-mod,
root-fs-mod and capabilities for a while.

And trying to write some module that would handle an ext2
filesystem in a ramdisk in another module. I was thinking
about using ext2fs server for Hurd/Mach, but I don't know
how simple it would be, how much ext2fs depends on Mach
or other Hurd concepts and libraries to work.

Marco Gerard told me not to use ext2fs and instead a simplefs
that would have no more than a header+files.

I would like to know more about this simplefs and what has being
worked on hurd-l4 lately. I would also aprecciate if you could
tell me about which dependencies a hello server would have
in Hurd/Mach.

Since I have not much time left, I must make an option between
going on with my toy OS already started or with hurd-l4.
Anyway, I should get some freedom, even that most of the
code should lack important things and be revised later on.

I think getting a proof of concept like booting and showing some
cool messages, perhaps offering some choice of input would be
good for the community to get a boost.

And if the price for this is getting some poor code that should be
revised later, I don't thinks it's a high price to pay. And I'd
like to do something that's not that poor and could be useful, but
I can't promise it will really be for this first time, since I've
already told you and I insist: I lack time.

Thanks for your attention. Wish you the best regards and success
for Hurd/L4.

Thadeu Cascardo.