[chaos-devel] chaos - ideas for 2008 and the future

[Per L. <pe...@gm...>]

Hi guys, and a happy new 2008 to all of you!

(All of the rest of the email is referring to "chaos-old" -- the 
original (and best? ;) chaos, the one that was most "feature-rich" at 
one time. What happened to chaos.net you might ask? Well, development 
stopped quite early after some days of intensive hacking in early 2006, 
partially because Henrik Hallin was attacked by a malicious stranger in 
his home city. He can tell you more about this if he likes to but 
nevertheless, his part of the development was never really taken up 
again after the accident. As far as I was concerned, I didn't really 
have very much spare time to spend on the project.)

As some of you (probably only really Henrik since he's the only one 
reading that list ;-) might has noticed, I've done some basic 
development on chaos lately. Nothing really new and fancy, but what I've 
done is tried and fix some obvious problems with the storm kernel and 
the libraries (the servers and programs remain unfixed) that prevented 
them from compiling with the current gcc toolchain (4.1) that is 
supplied with Debian stable (etch); it only worked with gcc 2.95 which 
was "bleeding edge" in 1998-2000 when we were hacking a lot on chaos but 
nowadays is rather old... :-) (FYI, Linux couldn't be compiled with 2.95 
back then, it required the "old" gcc 2.7.2 series, so we were in fact 
"cooler" than they. :P )

Anyway, when all of chaos compiles on a recent Debian installation, I 
think some of the issues below should be looked into. I'm not saying I 
personally will do all of them, not at all -- I have one 10-month old 
daughter and another (soon) 3-year old daughter to take care of, in 
addition to working full time as a software developer... so, my spare 
time is quite limited to say the least.

Alas, this is what I think would be worthwhile pursuing:

* Look into the problem with TCP connections not being ACK:ed properly. 
When we developed the IPv4 server back then, we never got TCP 
connections (from chaos to Linux) working, for some reason. Our SYN 
packets where never ACK:ed properly by Linux. We followed the RFC as far 
as we knew it but something still prevented it to work. This is an 
interesting thing to look into and I think I can gladly volunteer to 
take upon this ask. I will try too look into it more before the day of 
2010-12-31. :-)

* Create an ISO image for booting the chaos system, loading the servers 
in the proper order and starting up a basic cluido + log console. The 
ISO image can then be burnt onto a CD-RW and played around with simply. 
It would be great if the current chaos code would be tested on as many 
machines as possible since there might be issues with it being old and 
all. (My Core2 Duo caused an infinite hang in storm for example, I've 
fixed it now but there could be other problems with unsupported 
hardware. USB keyboards is an obvious thing, chaos only supports XT/AT 
and PS/2 keyboards for the moment)

* When that has been done, we should also create a vmware Player image 
with chaos included. I don't know but I think we can distribute it all 
as one .exe file -- great for being able to test chaos in the simplest 
possible way.

I think the work on virtualization platforms is one thing that differs 
most between the "early chaos era", around the year 2000, and now, 
around the year 2010. Back then, vmware was new (I remember when I first 
tried it out and it was really a "wow" piece of software). Now, vmware 
is even available as "free beer" (vmware server) and there are other 
options too -- VirtualBox is a great example that I use at work. Bochs 
also works well for testing out chaos, so a Linux inside vmware + Bochs 
inside that Linux is probably the easiest way to set up a chaos 
development environment. Which leads to the next point:

* Create a vmware Player Image with a chaos development environment, set 
up using Debian etch (or whatever is current at that time) with bochs 
set up inside the Linux machine. Ideally, this should be done so you can 
keep the image on a USB memory or similar (so you can bring along a full 
chaos development environment wherever you go, at work for example :-)

Over and out from me for now. Any spontaneous comments/flames?
--
Best regards,
Per Lundberg