GUI systems

[Steve Muir]

This seems like an appropriate time to throw in my two penn'orth as one of
the people who actually has written code for EROS.  I'm not going to
comment on the distribution and build environment, but just give my
general thoughts on where to proceed from here.

First of all, enough of the basic libc-like functionality to allow porting
of command-line type programs.  I know some of this stuff is already
present, like stdio and string, so perhaps we're already there, but a
shell was still a long way off last time I checked.

Secondly, networking is obviously crucial.  I see two big advantages to
having networking up and running: server applications, which seem to me to
be the most immediately interesting domain for EROS to attack, become
possible; and if we can rlogin (and/or do remote X for those who really
want to) then we don't need fancy local graphics capabilities, not even
virtual terminals.  I really believe that having your EROS machine locally
display bitmapped graphics should be a very low priority for EROS now.  
After all, client-side X (using the X `client' definition) is really just
a network protocol whose API happens to have the feel of a graphics
system.

Thirdly, what about multiprocessor support?  I know this is a very hard
problem, but I claim that it'ss extremely important in the server
appliance domain.

Cheers,

Steve
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Steve Muir				   Distributed Systems Lab, UPenn
sjmuir@dsl.cis.upenn.edu		http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sjmuir/