Re: Regarding the Future of ELKS

chriscureau
2007-05-07T18:12:57Z

Hello all!

I too had looked at ELKS initially because I had hopes that I could port the sources to the WDC 65816...a friend of mine and I have been working on a single board computer for some time now that needs an operating system, and with 16 megs of addressable RAM... :-) What I would like to see would be a separated design, where the architecture independent and architecture dependent portions are in separate directories. This would help to make the project usable for people who don't have the 8086/80286 hardware anymore, but are still interested in 16-bitters.

Just my ideas,
Chris Cureau

>
> From: Jody <jbruchon@nc.rr.com>
> Date: 2007/05/05 Sat PM 02:58:51 EDT
> To: ELKS <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
> Subject: Regarding the Future of ELKS
>
> 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
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