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New OSKit snapshot oskit-20000202
In honor of the first date in the OSKit's lifetime containing only even digits,
we are happy to announce a new OSKit snapshot containing only odds and ends.
(Our fearless leader Jay Lepreau has asked to be held personally
responsible for the one-day time warp you are now experiencing.)
If you've been burning to know what the OSKit would look like on a date
with all even digits, now is your big chance. (You'll just have to trust
us that nothing changed since yesterday. If you are burning to know what
it will look like on the second date with all even digits, odds are that
nothing will have changed by tomorrow.)
This is an informal snapshot to make available the improvements we've made
to the OSKit lately. Along with the usual bug fixes and miscellaneous
small improvements, this snapshot primarily features various configuration
and build tweaks to make compiling and using the OSKit a little more
seamless in common environments. In particular, the hosted oskit support
(aka "oskit-on-unix") is somewhat revamped and cleaned up, and should work
more easily out of the box (on FreeBSD and Linux). The "unsupported" gcc
front-end script has been rewritten and should now work better; the same
script (called "x86-oskit-gcc" or "arm32-oskit-gcc") works for linking
OSKit kernels or with the `-hosted-oskit' switch to build oskit-on-unix
executable files. (Note that if you are cross-compiling, we now recommend
using GCC 2.95.2, and the front-end script won't be built if your compiler
is a very old one. Native compilers based on GCC 2.7.x can still work, but
not cross-compilers.)
We have ongoing active OSKit-based projects involving the Kaffe Java VM,
MIT's Click Router package, and our own Active Networks NodeOS system.
(For more information about these projects, see our web pages.) We are
using these systems with the current OSKit internally, but it has been a
busy time and we have not had a chance to make the latest code for these
available yet. We will be collecting these changes and making them
publically available as we get the time. Anyone with urgent research needs
to use these systems with the latest OSKit can contact us, otherwise just
stay tuned for separate announcements on this mailing list.
As before, go to http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/
and everything hangs off there; currently mostly in ftp.
Thanks to all those who have sent in bug reports and/or fixes for past
snapshots. We appreciate your continued involvement in making the OSKit
more useful for everyone. All the best from the Flux Group!