[klibc] Where are we at...

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 15:17, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> So, I just got back from Europe and is feeling all dazed and confused.
> Where really are we at with the early userspace development?

I don't think anything has changed in the past few months.

In summary:

      * Standalone klibc builds fine against all recent kernels.
      * I maintain a tree with klibc and some standalone tools
        integrated into the 2.6 kernel build, at
        http://klibc.bkbits.net/
      * This tree is capable of mounting an initial filesystem
        (including getting a DHCP lease and doing an NFS mount) from
        initramfs, but initrd support hasn't migrated yet.
      * People have twiddled the initramfs build a little within Linus's
        2.5/2.6 kernel tree, but not in any interesting ways.
      * All other progress has stalled due to lack of time on my part
        and interest from others.  Every so often, someone pops up, says
        "hey, this looks interesting", and then goes away again.

At this point, I think it makes most sense to view really hammering
early userspace into shape as something to do early in the 2.7 time
frame, then perhaps considering a backport to 2.6 if anything useful
falls out.

Peter, I think you should bend Linus's ear in a few months about pulling
klibc and early userspace into early 2.7 as they currently stand, and
forcing people to carp, moan, and fix whatever corner cases actually
break things for them.  Otherwise, it's going to remain a marginal
project forever, for want of attention.

	<b