chaos-devel Mailing List for The chaos Operating System

Hello Johannes! Great that someone finally answered my email. :-)

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 15:11 +0100, Johannes Lundberg wrote:
> Some quick thoughts:
> 
> * Qemu can be used instead of VMware Player, and is fully
> redistributible. I have some hackish code I could use for wrapping it
> all into a single .EXE for easier testing. I will look into that.

Great - have you had any time to look into this further? I have no
first-hand experience with Qemu actually, I remember when it was
launched by the developer of Bochs... or perhaps that was plex86 rather
than qemu. :)

Anyway, I get the impresion that Qemu is less mature than the
"commercial" alternatives such as vmWare and VirtualBox (I use both of
them at work and they work great - except I've had some strange problems
with vmWare networking but they somehow disappeared.  :)

But, if Qemu works well then we might as well use it. The importance is
to make it simple to "bundle" chaos along with a suitable VM
implementation.

> * A ready-to-use developer virtual machine image sounds like a great
> thing indeed. All things we can do to make chaos development and
> testing less time consuming is good.

Yeah, we should just be careful so we don't spend all the time on the
sub-projects (such as that one :) since it can easily "eat" up the time
from the "real" development or whatever you wanna call it. I thought
about the developer VM for example, we could do a real cool one and make
it network-updatable so that we only distribute a "stub" which then
downloads the Debian packets needed (xemacs, gcc, so forth) over the
network every time you boot up. But, I doubt that there is any real
benefits to that approach except for the coolness/geekness factor. :-)

> * TCP would be fun. We need amd pcnet for the emulators though. Any
> good specs out there?

Yeah, I thought about pcnet actually before writing that email but I
forgot to mention it. However, Bochs doesn't need pcnet - Bochs emulate
an ISA ne2k card, and that works great with chaos. Noah Williamson wrote
an ne2k server a while back and I fixed some problems with it last year
(or perhaps 2006, unsure of which :) so that it worked pretty well with
bochs - I could boot chaos, and set up an IP address (perhaps even using
DHCP). I could then ping the chaos machine from my Linux host. :)

Pretty cool feeling I must say.

Anyway: it would be great if you could help out with the stuff you
mentioned. I think it is important that chaos is not a solo project - if
we can have an active commmunity of developers working on it, it will be
much more motivating for everyone to commit time and energy to work on
it. I think we are all pretty occupied with other things nowayears...
--
Best regards,
Per Lundberg

Some quick thoughts:

* Qemu can be used instead of VMware Player, and is fully
redistributible. I have some hackish code I could use for wrapping it
all into a single .EXE for easier testing. I will look into that.

* A ready-to-use developer virtual machine image sounds like a great
thing indeed. All things we can do to make chaos development and
testing less time consuming is good.

* TCP would be fun. We need amd pcnet for the emulators though. Any
good specs out there?

Regards,
  Johannes Lundberg


On Jan 1, 2008 1:15 AM, Per Lundberg <pe...@gm...> wrote:
> 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
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
> Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> chaos-devel mailing list
> cha...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/chaos-devel
>

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