Keywords

• Kernel
• Operating system
• The Hurd
• KOS
• translator
• interface
• OsKit
• virtual memory

Motivation

Our motivation for creating this topic was to organize all the differents presentations that were going to be done concerning The Hurd. Different developers of The Hurd proposed to make presentations, but nobody was ready to organize these.

The goal of the topic is to create an "official" way to organize presentations for The Hurd and to include other presentations which concern the subject of Kernel and operating system development. This include presentations of the Kid Operating System (KOS) project and of the OS Kit.

Speakers

• Matthieu Bonnetti
• Manuel Menal
• Neal H. Walfield
• Marcus Brinkmann
• Wolfgang Jarhling
• Daniel Wagner
• Ludovic Courtès
• Thomas Petazzoni

Presentations

• Topic presentation : Neal H. Walfield, Thomas Petazzoni
  A very short introduction of the topic to present the different presentations and speakers, and to propose other activities in TD room.
  
  
• General presentation of Gnu/Hurd operating system : Matthieu Bonnetti, Manuel Menal
  Presentation of the different concepts of The Hurd operating system.
  
  
• Authentication in Gnu/Hurd : Wolfgang Jahrling
  
  
  
• Virtual Memory Management, a New Approach for the Hurd on the L4 Microkernel : Neal Walfield
  Virtual Memory is one of the corner stones of multi-user operating systems. Most systems available today place all of the policy in a monolithic virtual memory manager, VMM, isolated from the rest of the system. One implication of this is that users have no way to communicate their memory needs or anticipated usage of allocated memory to the system pager. Thus, the VMM can only implement a global paging policy, typically, an approximation of LRU. On average, this is sufficient for many types of applications, however, as a result, garbage collectors, databases, computationally intense algorithms et al. suffer unduly. Mach made headway in virtual memory management with the introduction of external paging (i.e. the where and how not the when and which), yet it did little to improve the system paging policy. One late effort tried to address this problem with what they called PREMO pagers, however, this only brought more complexity to an already large microkernel. With the port of Hurd to L4, this situation is being readdressed. This talk will first explain how paging currently works in Mach and other systems, what is good about them and where they fail. Based on this, as argument for external paging policy will be presented followed by a proposal which attempts to fix the problems.
  
  
• The Hurd Interfaces : Marcus Brinkmann
  The Hurd server interfaces are at the heart of the Hurd system. They define the remote procedure calls (RPCs) that are used by the servers, the GNU C library and the utility programs to communicate with the Hurd system and to implement the POSIX personality of the Hurd as well as other features.
  This talk is a walk through the Hurd RPCs, and will give an overview of how they are used to implement the system. Individual RPCs will be used to illustrate important or exciting features of the Hurd system in general, and it will be shown how those features are accessible to the user at the command line, too.
  
  
• OSKit : Daniel Wagner
  Presentation of OSKit
  
  
• Implementation of translators for The Hurd : Ludovic Courtès
  After the global vision of the Hurd and its server interfaces given in Marcus Brinkmann's talk, this presentation will try to show how translators can be implemented for the GNU/Hurd. To start with, an overview of the features that can be offered by translators will be given. Hurd tools for translator development such as libraries will be presented. The implementation of translators for the Hurd will be illustrated by the mboxfs translator, a "mailbox filesystem" which allows to "mount" mailboxes.
  
  
• KOS : The Kid Operating System : Thomas Petazzoni
  Presentation of Kos project. This project consists in programming a small operating system. It wasn't created to concurrence operating systems such as *BSD, Linux or The Hurd, but for educational purposes. The development team tries to write as many documentation as possible, and to give lots of bibliography on the web site.
  
  

Links

• The Hurd homepage

• The homepage of the HurdFr association

• KOS, the Kid Operating System

Schedule

Thursday, July 11th

16:20-16:25	Presentation of the topic , by Neal H. Walfield, Thomas Petazzoni (Amphi C)	ENSEIRB Amphi C
16:25-17:20	General presentation of the GNU/Hurd operating System , by Matthieu Bonnetti, Manuel Menal (Amphi C)	ENSEIRB Amphi C
17:20-17:50	Authentication in the Hurd , by Wolfgang Jahrling (Amphi C)	ENSEIRB Amphi C
17:50-18:20	OS Kit , by Daniel Wagner (Amphi A)	ENSEIRB Amphi C

Friday, July 12th

14:00-15:00	Hurd Interfaces , by Marcus Brinkmann (Amphi C)	ENSEIRB Amphi A
15:00-15:40	Implementation of servers for the Gnu/Hurd , by Ludovic Courtès (Amphi C)	ENSEIRB Amphi A
16:20-16:50	The Kid Operating System , by Thomas Petazzoni (Amphi A)	ENSEIRB Amphi A
16:50-18:20	Virtual Memory Management, a New Approach for the Hurd on the L4 Microkernel , by Neal H. Walfield (Amphi A)	ENSEIRB Amphi A