diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | faq/system_port.mdwn | 45 |
1 files changed, 45 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/faq/system_port.mdwn b/faq/system_port.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 00000000..eec7c917 --- /dev/null +++ b/faq/system_port.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]] + +[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable +id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this +document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or +any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant +Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license +is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation +License|/fdl]]."]]"""]] + +[[!meta title="Doing a GNU/Hurd System Port"]] + +How difficult is it to port the GNU/Hurd system to run on another architecture? + +The GNU/Hurd system consists of [[/Hurd]] servers running as user-space +processes on top of the [[GNU Mach|microkernel/mach/gnumach]] microkernel. The +system functionality is usually accessed through the +[[POSIX|posix_compatibility]] interface that is provided by [[/glibc]] and +[[/libpthread]]. + +A whole-system port involves touching all these components, with varying +degree, of course. + +For a CPU architecture port, the microkernel is the most involved part, +followed by glibc and the threading library. + +The original [[microkernel/Mach]] microkernel was portable to a number of +architectures which were a lot more popular at the beginning of the 1990s than +they are now. + +The GNU/Hurd system is currently available for the x86 architecture. This +includes emulators such as [[hurd/running/QEMU]] (or KVM), or +[[hurd/running/VirtualBox]]. Besides this, there is a port for the [[Xen +domU|microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports/xen]] *sub-architecture*. + +Further on, there are some [[unfinished porting +attempts|microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports]] for the Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC +architectures. These have not been completed due to little developer interest. + +Another option is to do the port at a different layer: port the Hurd servers to +not run on the GNU Mach microkernel but on another [[microkernel]], or even on +the Linux kernel, for example. While there have been experiments for [[using +another microkernels|which_microkernel]] or [[having Mach run as a POSIX +user-space process|open_issues/mach_on_top_of_posix]], such a port has not yet +been completed. |