Re: Regarding the Future of ELKS

Hans
2007-05-06T09:23:23Z

Hi Jody,

I am sure there is still live in ELKS but unless it is picked up by a very
enthusiastic experienced hacker with lots of spare time and experience I
think ELKS will remain a dormant project (like so many of sourceforge).
Unfortunately my hardware is not PC/XT compatible which means that I need to
understand all the nitty gritty stuff. When I looked at the source code I
quickly came to realise that this is an un-doable project for me. This was
not helped by a custom C compiler and non-flexible development environment
so in the end I gave up and became one of the many(?) low-active lurkers on
this list :-)

I will remain subscribed to this list and hope that one day ELKS will burst
into life with a vengeance :-)

Hans
www.ht-lab.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jody" <jbruchon@nc.rr.com>
To: "ELKS" <linux-8086@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 7:58 PM
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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