GNU/Hurd in 2010
gnu.org
GNU/Hurd in 2010
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#2Interesting. I'll try Hurd under Xen, soon.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#3I gave up on Hurd back in the late 1980s. I'm not kidding. Before it was even called Hurd. I had heard for several years that GNU was going to make their own kernel. Eventually I gave up and stopped hoping for a release.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#4I certainly admire the perseverance.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#5I always felt that GNU continued Hurd development out of spite that no one would call Linux GNU/Linux.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#6I certainly admire the perseverance.
A lot of things take more time than 27 years, but it is quite impressive to work for something for so long when they are getting nowhere.
It is also pretty stupid.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#7Did someone ever analyze the 20year Hurd-History and write a book about it? I wonder what were the main factors that contributed to its (incredibly) slow development. Maybe there're lessons to learn here, there have to be.
Edit: Typo, 20 years, not 27
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#8I think the future of microkernels is the L4 family: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_kernel
L4 systems are much smaller and simpler than Mach: (7 system calls and a footprint of 12k, compared to 140/330k for Mach, according to Wikipedia). L4 has much better IPC performance.
It appears that some people attempted to port Hurd to L4 but gave up: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/port_to_l4.html
In that page they say "Eventually, a straight-forward port of the original Hurd's design wasn't deemed feasible anymore by the developers, partly due to them not cosidering L4 suitable for implementing a general-purpose operating system on top of it, and because of deficiencies in the original Hurd's design, which they discovered along their way."
There is no reference or explanation of why they considered L4 unsuitable for a general-purpose operating system, which is too bad, because it would be extremely interesting to read.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#9I gave up on Hurd back in the late 1980s. I'm not kidding. Before it was even called Hurd. I had heard for several years that GNU was going to make their own kernel. Eventually I gave up and stopped hoping for a release.
I think of it as GNU/Xanadu.
Re: GNU/Hurd in 2010
#10Can't wait til this is released so I can play Duke Nukem Forever on it.