design objectives

[Neal H. Walfield]

At Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:21:09 -0500,
Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 23:14 +0100, Neal H. Walfield wrote: 
> > At Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:09:27 -0500,
> > Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> I have *repeatedly* asked that the
> design objectives of the HURD be captured concretely so that they can be
> examined. Little progress has been made.

I have put a lot of effort into capturing our technical objectives
over the past year.  The result of these efforts is the critique and
the decomposition and refinement paper (Improving Usability via Access
Decomposition and Policy Refinement).  The latter in particular
presents a number of scenarios that we are specifically interested in
addressing.

  - security: programs are not users; they should be constrained
      according to the user's intents

  - resource management
    - efficiency: facilitate use of local knowledge
    - soft real-time: expose virtualized resources with useful access
      case characteristics

  - integration: safe extension of the system

I apologize if this is not enough but this is the limit of my
abilities at the moment.


Neal