FYI, some Hurd mention in Rumpkernel's yearly report -------- Missatge reenviat -------- Assumpte: looking back at 2015 Data: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 15:30:50 +0000 De: Antti Kantee <po...@rumpkernel.org> Respon a: po...@rumpkernel.org A: rumpkernel-users <rumpkernel-us...@freelists.org>
Hello, and a belated welcome to 2016, As people who've been on the list for a while know, the visions & roadmap mail comes during summer, simply because it's nicer to think about those things while sitting outside enjoying sunny weather. In this mail we look back at 2015, if only to give an excuse to write light prose for Friday afternoon delight. For the rump kernel project, 2015 was undoubtedly dominated by the unikernel use case. Thinking back, at the beginning of 2015 only Martin and myself were regularly contributing to the Rumprun unikernel (*). Now we have at least a dozen people contributing more or less regularly (**), especially as maintainers for rumprun-packages. What has been especially nice to see is that folks don't only contribute new packages, they also stick around and maintain them. Those who've been following my rants know that I think making something maintainable and maintaining it is much more demanding than just whipping something up and forgetting about it. It's also harder to find motivation for maintenance, at least unless you have non-academic real world interest in keeping the subject matter afloat. A big thanks goes to the contributors of the packaging exploration/effort. *) back then, the Rumprun repository as we know it now didn't even exist, it still existed as two separate repositories named rumprun-xen and rumprun-baremetal. In fact, for all I remember, we didn't even market those as unikernels back then. Their unification surely improved my mental stability, and starting to call the result a unikernel also shows how far unikernels came as a global concept in the past year. **) As of writing this, the rumpkernel project on github has 23 members, which means that 23 internet beings -- most of them probably human -- have push access to at least one repository under repo.rumpkernel.org Now, while unikernels are the proverbial Soviet space pencil, if you want to create a hardcopy of War and Peace, you'll most likely want to reach for some other tool. The folks who brought balance to the Source by improving a different type of tool was the HURD microkernel project. They became, to the best of my knowledge, the first folks outside of rumpkernel.org to incorporate PCI device drivers provided by rump kernels into their system. Again, it was not idle academic curiosity, but rather solving a real problem for their system. Nicely done! On the documentation front, the wiki received improvements from a wide number of people. A few even contributed brand new articles. Writing documentation is harder than writing code, since it has to be written against non-exact and not-well-defined human parsers. That difficulty is why it is very important to get a breadth of people contributing to the docs. Many thanks go to those who have chipped in on that front. If you think there was some other significant type of 2015 happening which failed to surf my brain waves, please do share. This year, unikernels will probably go even further. And I will be sitting here as the grey lord (***) making sure things are in balance for all uses of rump kernels. Please keep pouring them in. - antti ***) knowledge of Dungeon Master is also a definite requirement for literacy on this list. wonder if that should be in the FAQ.