All: Mr. Fortaine has been running around stirring up trouble among several senior researchers recently, sharing quotes and statements back and forth without context and wasting a great deal of time.
Concerning his latest post here, he has offered two links: [1] http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/news/semiconductor.shtml [2] http://www.computationallogic.com/reports/files/028.pdf The first was offered in response to my statement that there are zero example of high-robustness or high-security monolithic systems today. I think his point is that the Linux systems have been running there for 5 months. Just for the record, 5 months of uptime is not considered "high robustness", and the article says absolutely nothing about security. The second link is a reference to Bill Bevier's dissertation, which is entitled "Kit: A Study in Operating System Verification". Matt Kaufmann suggested this link to Fortaine at about 4pm EST yesterday, but Fortaine obviously hasn't read it. First, let me say that the Kit work is brilliant. It was a major step forward in the state of the art in operating systems work, and it remains an excellent piece of work today. In fact, I spent a bunch of time speaking with Bill Bevier about the work about two years ago. While Kit is a terrific piece of work, Bevier is very straightforward about acknowledging that the Kit system is a long way from anything that could be considered a "production capable" kernel. Kit shows that verification on a more capable operating system kernel may be possible with a lot of work. It does not show that it has been done. Yesterday, Fortaine sent a note to Matt Kaufmann that quoted me out of context and created a serious miscommunication. As a result of this and other actions, I have asked him NOT to forward any other mail of mine (which request, please note, he has just ignored). One day later, without waiting for my response to Kaufmann, Fortaine is now attacking me here. Fortaine closes with: > For me, this man and his project are only a bad joke ... Be more > serious, guys :-) ! > > Yes, in fact, I believe if you want to see the HURDNG boot one day, we > will need to build our microkernel and choose our language .... As I have said in a previous, extensive note, building a kernel may in fact be the right thing for the HurdNG team to do. I've also given some ideas about how this should be decided. But please keep in mind that Fortaine has no idea what he is talking about, and that his "conclusions" are established by a series of discussions involving out-of-context quotes on topics that he doesn't really understand. Also, keep in mind that Fortaine has absolutely no knowledge of the financial investment that is going into Coyotos and the progress that has been made on its implementation. In fact, he hasn't even *asked* about this! Regards, Jonathan Shapiro _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
