kyuba.org - unix init and low-level libraries

Since some asshat stole my ICQ credentials and I can't be arsed to contact the ICQ admin crowd, I set up a new jabber server on this 'ere machine. The server is public and free to register for everyone; (surprisingly) i'm jyujin@becquerel.org on this server. And, as customary with jabber, you can contact me on there even without regging an account on that server, at least it ought to work in theory.

Alright everyone, listen up. This blog entry was long overdue, but we all know what they say about things that're long overdue ;D. Every now and again on IRC, there's people who'd like to try all of our stuff as it is right now. Even though there's not much to do at the moment, this does kinda help with finding bugs, so I'll try to summarise how to build the tools. (This is just a quick summary, real docs for building will follow at a later stage.

This particular question seems to have come up a lot lately, on IRC as well as other places. People wonder why oh why I would have started Curie. A lot of it is along the lines of "why didn't you use one of the glibc alternatives?" and "ZOMG THE WHEEL IS BEING REINVENTED AGAIN!?". I'll try to point out why not only was it not possible to use "an alternate libc", but also why the whole notion of that sort of question is both pointless and meaningless in this context. In a nutshell: Curie is NOT simply a clone of glibc, or any other libc for that matter!

I'd like to take this opportunity (my acute post-release mood), to point you all to http://glendix.org -- a project that strives to bring plan9 binary compatibility and more plan9 goodiness to the linux kernel. The reason for me pointing this out is that since a month or two now, we're the proud hoster of the glendix.org domain, and we more or less joined up with those nice fellows back then. Check it out and give it a shot, it's made of large quantities of awesome and fluffy, and the guys are really nice over on their IRC channel (freenode, channel #glendix) :D.

Oh the week is getting really good. First of all, I'm proud to properly announce that we're being sponsored by the Greek company Codex. Markos_ had already given us some code back in the eINIT days, and I've mentioned this sponsoring in each and every release's documentation, but it's just a lot better to have it right on the frontpage! Second, the v9fs patch i wrote has been accepted, so you might be able to use dev9 with the next coolest linux version. Or maybe in two version. Either way, it's coming.

... I've finally slept enough for a change, and last weekend I moved my arse to find that character dev issue in v9fs. Well, now it really is with v9fs. It's a trivial fix too, the patch against current kernels is now on the v9fs-users ML. That means dev9 actually works (with some other issues that I still need to work out :D). Now someone just needs to go and test it... I'll try to patch it into openrc sometime during the week or on the weekend.

I completely forgot to point out that there's an official IRC hideout for kyuba.org: #kyuba on freenode. Join up and have fun. Oh and don't forget about #9p, also on freenode, which is made of awesome and plan9 goodiness.

I figured it'd be about time to post some details on the current status of kyuba, einit, dev9, libcurie and libduat. That, and our plans for world domination, of course. ITT: Details on wtf is going on, wtf this is all about and wtf it's good for.

... and here to stay. Been off the interbutts for long enough now, and the wiki isn't exactly a great replacement for this 'ere. Let's get right back to work then, shall we?

Go~~ intertubes!