Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X
by vezzy-fnord on Friday August 28, 2015 @12:01AM
(#10133675)
The option of using MkLinux as a host has been raised as a hypothetical since many years ago, but was never tried. I don't have spare PPC hardware in mind, but that's interesting to hear it works.
Porting the NextBSD work to the Linux kernel API is certainly something on my list in case rump integration for Hurd doesn't pan out, in any event.
In fact, if you look at Mach support code on glibc's code, you'll see build time conditionals for supporting non-GNU Mach versions.
The bootstrap server is not a problem either, but the lack of memory object would indeed break all libpager based translators, among other stuff.
As a PoC, I wrote a filesystem translator (https://github.com/slp/anonfs) which doesn't rely on memory objects, implementing conventional read/write semantics (no mmap() support, though).