🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <71395@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> templon@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (jeffrey templon) writes:
>
>Hi,
>
>I have seen the posting on gnu.announce that the GNU kernel is about
>ready.

That is an overstatement based on how *I* read the announcement.

>  There have been lots of rumours about this beast on the net, and
>now is probably the time to clear them up.

Note that I *don't* speak for the FSF (or CMU for that matter), but I
can make educated guesses at some of your questions.

>1) What is sort of the minimum hardware configuration on which the GNU
>	kernel will run?

It is based on Mach. That means that the kernel proper qualifies as
"lean and mean". Unfortunately, operations which you typically expect
to be done by the kernel would be done by an Unix emulation process.
This does have an overhead but I wouldn't expect it to be that bad.

I think Mach depends pretty heavily on being able to do virtual memory
tricks. I wouldn't expect it to run on machines which can't support
demand paged virtual memory.

>  A typical UNIX-PC (typical AT&T 3B1 - not a typical
>	IBM PC clone running un*x!!) has between 40-70 M of disk, 1 to
>	2 M of physical memory, 4 M of virtual memory per process (I think
>	there is hardware support for this, it's a 68010 machine.)

I suppose it depends on what the MMU is like. Weren't the pre 68020
a bit brain dead when it comes to memory management? Similarly, I
wouldn't expect Mach to work on a 80286. An 80386 should be fine.

>3) On what machines will there be official support to start with?

I would guess a Sun something or other but this is pure speculation.
After that, I guess it depends on who contributes ports!
-- 
Ian Dall     life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts
                       some people more severely than others.