What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Frank Mayhar]

In article <4609 at alvin.mcnc.org> spl at mcnc.org.UUCP (Steve Lamont) writes:
>As quoted from <422 at ladcgw.ladc.bull.com> by frank at ladc.bull.com (Frank Mayhar):
>| I like the SunOS virtual memory concept (minus the current crop of bugs, of
>| course).  If you're writing a Real Operating System, why worry about machines
>| that won't support virtual memory.  Hell, by the time Gnu is ready, non-VM
>| machines will probably be a thing of the past anyway.  Shared libraries
>Like the Cray Y-MP or Cray 3?  [...]

Melinda Shore at Mt. Xinu also brought up this question (in email).  Here's
my reply.

Actually, IMHO, a Cray is a very poor choice of hardware to run a general-
purpose OS on.  As I see it, you would want the Cray to run a minimal kernel
(primarily consisting of a scheduler) that accepts compute-bound jobs from
a client machine running some general OS, and executes them.  Basically,
a high-speed backend that runs those cpu bound jobs that are so hard on
general-purpose OS's, and that's *all* it does.  The general-purpose OS
(running on a virtual memory machine :-) performs task scheduling, memory
allocation, job queueing, etc, and hands the jobs to the Cray.

Disclaimer:  I have no direct knowledge of how Crays work.  When I made my
comment, it was in reference to general-purpose operating systems.  And, no,
I don't think that a Cray has any business running a Real Operating System.
(Half :-)
-- 
Frank Mayhar  ..!uunet!ladcgw!frank (frank at ladc.bull.com)
              Bull HN Los Angeles Development Center
              5250 W. Century Blvd., LA, CA  90045  Phone:  (213) 216-6241