Re: Regarding the Future of ELKS

Hello all!

I too had looked at ELKS initially because I had hopes that I could port the sources to the WDC 65816...a friend of mine and I have been working on a single board computer for some time now that needs an operating system, and with 16 megs of addressable RAM... :-)  What I would like to see would be a separated design, where the architecture independent and architecture dependent portions are in separate directories.  This would help to make the project usable for people who don't have the 8086/80286 hardware anymore, but are still interested in 16-bitters.

Just my ideas,
Chris Cureau

> 
> From: Jody <[email protected]>
> Date: 2007/05/05 Sat PM 02:58:51 EDT
> To: ELKS <[email protected]>
> Subject: Regarding the Future of ELKS
> 
> Hello everyone.  This is Jody, the current maintainer of the ELKS 
> project.  I wanted to ask for everyone's opinion on what the future of 
> ELKS should be.
> 
> I can see many compelling reasons to drop ELKS entirely or shift it away 
> from the 80(2)86-oriented platform, including the following:
> 
> * No one works on ELKS.  Really.  I'm no C programmer, and apparently 
> all the ones that COULD work on it have moved on to "bigger better 
> things" in their lives.
> 
> * 8086/80286 cores are being dropped in favor of other platforms, 
> including ARM, 386EX, Coldfire, etc.  While embedded Linux covers a lot 
> of that territory, there is certainly some room for discussion of 
> changing ELKS to be more portable and pushing it to those platforms. 
> The minimalist approach to the ELKS kernel would make it far smaller 
> than Linux and it could potentially compete with the likes of other 
> smaller operating systems used in embedded applications, such as VxWorks.
> 
> * ELKS has not developed to a very "usable" stage yet.  There are a 
> hundred different ways the project could go, but the original stated 
> goals are quickly showing that they are not it.  Lack of interest in the 
> project and limited ability to reuse the code are clear signs that 
> something must change.
> 
> To those of you who are still subscribed to this list: what do you think 
> should be done?  I look forward to hearing your answers!
> 
> ~Jody
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