Projects

We can't do everything we want to by ourselves; we're depending on other hackers in the Internet community joining in and helping us in various ways. This page describes a number of Mach subprojects that anyone with the appropriate skills is welcome to join in and help with, as well as a few projects already in progress that might be benefitted by some extra help as well. If you have anything to add to this page, just send it to me (Bryan Ford, baford@cs.utah.edu).

Needing to be Done

Here are some specific projects that really need to be done, but we won't have time to do ourselves any time soon. If you see anything in this section that you're interested in doing, just contact me to find out any further details that may be available or if anyone else is already working on it, and then go to it!

Easy-to-install Mach distribution: In order to attract more people from the Linux/BSD crowd, we really need someone to put together an easy-to-install Mach+Lites or (when it's mature enough) Mach+Hurd binary distribution. This distribution might be just an add-on supplement to an existing monolithic-kernel distribution, or it could be an entirely separate distribution with a whole new set of binaries. Of course, a simple add-on to an existing distribution is likely to be simpler and more popular, so we should try to go with that approach if at all possible. (Mach+Lites on the i386 is already pretty close to being a drop-in NetBSD kernel replacement.)
New Boot Loader for PCs: Currently we have to choose between the Mach/BSD boot blocks, which are totally brain-dead and unfriendly in various respects, and LILO (the Linux Loader), which is nice and featureful but has the stupid restriction of not being able to load any boot image larger than about 512KB. Also, some appropriate boot loader support could make Mach's new boot module system much cleaner and more efficient and get rid of various horrible kludges. Note that this new boot loader could (and should) be useful to the BSD, Linux, and VSTa communities as well.
The boot loader should ideally would fulfill at least these requirements:
- Backward compatible with Linux, Mach, and BSD boot images.
- Functional under Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Mach.
- User friendly (e.g. like OS/2's Boot Manager).
- No size limit on boot images other than available memory.
- Ability to load multiple boot modules on bootup directly from different files, eliminating the need to compose large monolithic boot images beforehand.
- Ability to operate either by interpreting specific file system types (like the Mach/BSD boot loaders currently do), or by using precalculated block lists (like LILO does).
- Be at least somewhat machine-independent, so that applicable parts of the code can be reused on other architectures.
New Device Configuration Mechanism: The way Mach devices detect hardware, configure themselves, make themselves known to servers, etc. is currently a horrendous kludge and needs replacing. Anyone interested in doing this, please contact me and I'll give you more details about what I have in mind.
VSTa integration: Introduce some level of VSTa compatibility into Mach, so we can take advantage of some of the cool stuff that's being done in VSTa. I haven't explored this much yet, so I don't know what might be feasible, but the possibilities should at least be checked out. For starters, it would be great if we just had someone permantly acting as a go-between for the two projects: someone who can keep fairly close track of both systems, keep recent versions of both of them installed and running on their machine, suggest possible ways to cross-fertilize or make the projects converge, and so on.

Currently In Progress

This is a list of some projects that are underway in various places; some of them perhaps could also use some additional help. Contact addresses are provided in case you're interested in any of them.

Linux device drivers on Mach: Creating a framework that will allow Mach to run Linux device drivers in the kernel. May be extended later with user-level device driver support. Contact goel@cs.columbia.edu (Shantanu Goel).
Presentation/Interface IPC System: A new high-performance, flexible IPC system for Mach. Includes adopting/developing an IDL that's new to Mach. Contact baford@cs.utah.edu (Bryan Ford).
More research at Utah: most of these are at too early a stage to be worth talking about. Slides from an overview talk give some details.
Improve the PA-RISC support: Debugging support, debugging, lots.... Contact mike@cs.utah.edu (Mike Hibler).
Small CORBA-compliant POSIX-like personality: Contact csb@tomx.elte.hu (Csizmazia Balazs).
Mach port for the Amiga: Contact niklas@appli.se (Niklas Hallqvist).