Re: L4 meets the Hurd at the Congress in Berlin

[Horst Wenske]

> >>>>> On Mon, 31 Dec 2001 19:42:33 +0100, Moritz Schulte 
> <address@hidden> said:
> MS> Hi there,
> MS> the CCC congress was fun for me, I hope for the others, too.

Yes, the 18. CCC congress was really great. Interesting talks, workshops 
and nice people.

> Not only
> MS> that there were some Hurd people, but also two L4 hackers from
> MS> Karlsruhe.  Neal had his really nice talk on the Hurd and after that
> MS> the L4 people talked spontaneouslly a bit about L4.

The slides of my talk should be soon available on the 18c3 web page. You 
can find the slides also here: 
http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uj22/L4_meets_HURD.pdf

> Whether or not SawMill is "dead" is more a matter of nomenclature than
> anything else. The project goals have moved considerably, for example
> it is no longer married to Linux source. SawMill activities have also
> mostly moved from IBM to Karlsruhe. The revised focus will probably
> justify a name change.

Nice to know. As far as I have known SawMill is a frozen/dead 
(nomenclature?) project and people I know, who are working at SawMill in 
the moment, have given me the same impression. But I am not involved deeply 
with the SawMill project and Gernot knows much better than me what is 
planned for the future.

> In any case we see the Hurd as a potentially very interesting
> application of L4. However we haven't analysed the issues thoroughly
> enough yet to be able to determine how well the Hurd is suited to
> be a good demonstration of L4 capabilities.

I have got a GNU HURD cd set from a HURD developer (thanks!) and will try a 
HURD installation to get more familiar with it. Before the CCC congress I 
have not heard of L4 HURD and have known almost nothing about HURD.


> MS> o He wants to convince the IDL4 hacker to release it.
>
> No convincing necessary. IDL4 will be released when it's ready for
> it.

This answer is not really helpful for the HURD guys.
There are serveral open questions I want to ask Andreas, who is in my 
opinion the only guy, who can really answer this questions:
1) What is the planned licence for idl4 (GPL?)
2) Is there a planned idl4 release date?
3) How far is the new idl4 compiler compatible with the old idl4 stubs of 
chacmOS (chacmOS was released July 2000 - we used an old idl4 version)
4) Is it possible to add an old idl4 version or some sort of pre-release of 
idl4 to chacmOS (not all idl4 features are needed), so that the HURD guys 
can build new servers and play around with the system.

bye
Horst