Re: GUI systems Steve Muir (sjmuir@dsl.cis.upenn.edu)
Tue, 27 Jun 2000 16:04:42 -0400 (EDT)

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/