Regarding the Future of ELKS

Jody
2007-05-05T18:58:51Z

Hello everyone. This is Jody, the current maintainer of the ELKS
project. I wanted to ask for everyone's opinion on what the future of
ELKS should be.

I can see many compelling reasons to drop ELKS entirely or shift it away
from the 80(2)86-oriented platform, including the following:

* No one works on ELKS. Really. I'm no C programmer, and apparently
all the ones that COULD work on it have moved on to "bigger better
things" in their lives.

* 8086/80286 cores are being dropped in favor of other platforms,
including ARM, 386EX, Coldfire, etc. While embedded Linux covers a lot
of that territory, there is certainly some room for discussion of
changing ELKS to be more portable and pushing it to those platforms.
The minimalist approach to the ELKS kernel would make it far smaller
than Linux and it could potentially compete with the likes of other
smaller operating systems used in embedded applications, such as VxWorks.

* ELKS has not developed to a very "usable" stage yet. There are a
hundred different ways the project could go, but the original stated
goals are quickly showing that they are not it. Lack of interest in the
project and limited ability to reuse the code are clear signs that
something must change.

To those of you who are still subscribed to this list: what do you think
should be done? I look forward to hearing your answers!

~Jody