Cygwince

[Craig A. Vanderborgh]

Hello Everyone:

This posting is sure to incur the wrath of Christopher Faylor.  While 
I'm sorry about that, this time it just can't be helped.

After many years of developing GNU tools and infrastructure for Windows 
CE 3.0+, we have decided that we need the functionality that Cygwin 
provides.  We already have an extended newlib that we've built that 
gives us significant POSIX functionality on CE.  But what we really want 
to do is run Bash, and that means we need fork()/vfork() and the other 
more advanced functionality that only Cygwin provides.  Thus, we are 
setting out to create "Cygwince".

We are not naive in trying to do a Cygwin port to CE.  We know that:

1. CE has no console device.  This does not bother us because we will be 
using the system primarily via rlogin as our CE device has no screen.  
We'll have to "plumb around" the missing console device, but that is not 
expected to be a big problem.

2. Implementing fork() on CE was well nigh impossible until very 
recently.  But as of "CE.NET" 4.0, the all-important DuplicateHandle() 
system call is now available and supposedly has the expected behavior.  
We believe this means that CE 4.0+ has the required infrastructure to 
support the Cygwin fork()/vfork() implementation.

We are pretty sure that we can get the Cygwin DLL to run well on CE 
4.0+.  We have only some questions about X86 "asm" statements in the 
fork() implementation.  We would like one of the experts (e.g. cgf) to 
annotate (with source code comments) the "asm" statements in the fork 
code.  This is all we need - we just need to understand what these 
statements are supposed to do so that we can make the same things happen 
on Xscale.

We are going to be starting with the mingw version of Cygwin - MSYS - 
primarily to try to keep the size of the DLL down.  Another reason for 
starting from this distribution is that MSYS has a version of bash and 
the utilities that all come together in a fairly tidy bundle.

The Cygwin people should make a decision as to whether we should submit 
patches for Windows CE to the Cygwin project.  We are of course going to 
make all the results of our efforts publicly available, after all we 
have to do this.  But we are also willing to cooperate with the Cygwin 
project to the extent that is deemed necessary/desirable.

Best regards,
craig vanderborgh
voxware incorporated

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