GUI systems

[Kragen Sitaker]

Steve Muir writes:
> 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.

That's worth about ten times as much as my tuppence (and Shawn's, etc.) :)

> 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.

I agree.  I don't yet have a good enough grasp of EROS to have any
idea.

> 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 am of the opinion that server applications alone are an evolutionary
dead end, but I agree that it is a direction in which making a useful
system is fairly easy.

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

I think that eventually all computer systems will be multiprocessor;
I'm not sure that eventually all computers will be SMP.  Supporting
non-SMP (and non-pseudo-SMP --- i.e. non-NUMA) computers requires only
kernel support for networking.

The vast majority of network servers are presently limited by available
bandwidth, not by CPU speed, and thus SMPing them gives no advantage.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)