Re: EDE - Personal Suggestions and Ideas

Gábor Lénárt
2004-05-26T10:06:58Z

Re,

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 07:33:08AM -0600, Miguel Bolanos wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> As a result of the fact that ELKS seems to be back to life, I have been

Or at least the traffic of the mailing list ;-)

> Many people have made me the question this 2 questions:
>
> "What's the purpose of ELKS?"
> "What's your goal on your ELKS contribution?"
>
> I personally believe that we should focus ELKS on not a "for fun"
> project but turn serious, now I'm not willing to be misunderstood here..
> but i believe that more than wish lists we should have very well defined
> goals for the project.
>
> I would like to say that my personal goal, is get a kernel that has:
>
> - TCP/IP support. (Yes Alan i know we already have, i just want to
> point each thing i believe important even if it already exists)
> - PPP support
> - Support for various NICs
> - swap support

Swapping? It's not so trivial ... Sure, if you assume that context switching
can only be done by the scheduler, you can find an algorithm to notify
a "swap deamon" (or whatever) to do swap in/out, but there is an important
difference between this behaviour and swapping eg in Linux: an OS running
on a hardware doing "paging" (like 386+) you can swap in/out per page basis,
while ELKS behaviour on 8086 could be only a 'swap the whole process'
stuff, since there is no hw level mechanism to 'swap out a page and mark as
virtual or something and let to generate an exception which can be used by
OS to do swapping back that page'. On 286 you CAN do something similar with
exceptions but since there is no paging, only a whole segment can be paged
in/out. There was an idea (by me) to alter size of the segment to be able
to swap out the 'tail' of a segment with setting size to some lower value
than the actual used size so refeering to offset greater than that size
would trigger an exception. However it's far from the page based stuff
can be done on a 386 like arch, sure ...

> - maybe ext2fs support.

And what about journaling? ;-)

> Then get EDE to have the following features:
>
> - Capable of been installed on a hard disk ( i know, done)
> - Boot loader
> - Maybe implement something like bootsplash or Linux Progress Patch
> - X support.. perhaps Microwindows can be the solution?

So, some framebuffer-like feature would be usefull, both for having
bootsplash and other silly :) stuffs, and implementing some whatever
windowing system on the top of it, like picoGUI, or whatever, even
svgalib like apps but using fb instead.

> - An internet browser

You mean web browser?

> - a Gui mail client
> - maybe an irc client

It would be quite simple, I written a little iRC client of course without
any scripting, logging, etc whatever complex feature, but the core iRC
protocol is VERY simple.

> - A little "office" suite

mvi ("mini vi") with clip? ;-)

- Gábor (larta'H)
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