Future of ELKS

[Miguel Bolanos <mike@linuxlabs.com>]

Good day to all,

The project seems to be finally awaking from a very long period of
inactivity, this can be reflected not only by the traffic on the mailing
list, but on the amount of people hanging around at the irc channel and
the quality of the discussions over there.

Based on this facts, I believe that it is important that all the people
involved and interested in ELKS, provide their own opinions on what the
future of ELKS should be... I know of many wanting to have specific
features that are not currently in the kernel.. and others that as well
have interesting ideas for code reduction and improvements. So if you
are one them, please feel free yourself, as all this feedback is
important for us upgrade the TODO and roadmap of the project.

The current things that are been done are:

- Creation of an additional kernel that will use linux 2.6 coding style,
this is been done because we are looking forward to enable the
possibility of including support for 8086 and similar on the official
linux kernel as an option... of course this is will take a long time,
and doesn't mean that work on the current "production kernel" will be
depricated or anything like that, we which to encorage you to keep
contributing on the "production" kernel.. and the "new" kernel project
will be a work in parallel that at some point will have all this
improvements on the production kernel merged.

- A possibility of using gcc to create 8086 binaries might be a
possibility with a patch created by our irc friend boto. If the tests of
this are successful we will enable elkscmd to let the users decide if
they which to use gcc-8086 or our current bcc :)

Anyways thats all for now. Hope to hear back from all.
best wishes

Mike