*BSD News Article 14785


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!warwick!uknet!mcsun!sun4nl!eur.nl!pk
From: pk@cs.few.eur.nl (Paul Kranenburg)
Subject: Re: What happened to these projects ?
Message-ID: <1993Apr20.191445.16817@cs.few.eur.nl>
Sender: news@cs.few.eur.nl
Reply-To: pk@cs.few.eur.nl
Organization: Erasmus University Rotterdam
References: <1r17cqINNqgi@fstgds01.tu-graz.ac.at>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 19:14:45 GMT
Lines: 34

In <1r17cqINNqgi@fstgds01.tu-graz.ac.at> chmr@edvz.tu-graz.ac.at (Christoph Robitschko) writes:

>There have been discussions in the Newsgroups and the mailing lists at ref
>about a few projects for 386BSD, but I haven't heard anything about them
>for a long time. Among these projects I remember:

>	shared libraries
>	loadable kernel modules
>	/proc filesystem
>	booting 386BSD from DOS
>	environment dependend symlinks
>	object file system
>	automatic /dev configuration
>	kernel configuration utility
>	better device probing

>Is anybody working on any variant of the above projects ?
>There has been a very live discussion about a few of these, but I
>haven't seen many actual implementations.

/proc filesystem: I started on this one a while ago. The VFS interface is
there, but as yet nothing useful can be done with it (except `ls -l' :-).
Things left to do: place hooks in various other parts of kernel (in the
fork(), exec(), exit(), signal(), fault() code etc.), and a nice set of
ioctl()'s to go with it.

shared libraries: I'm slowly digesting the gas code, with the aim of
modifying it to grok gcc's PIC output. Then ld must be taken care of
and a run-time loader mechnism must be devised. It seems that Sun has
made its shared library implementation public. That might provide a nice
starting point (although I'd rather loose its .sa shared archives).

-pk