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GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

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Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#21

Post by tonfreed »

acheron wrote: post #13

While I laughed at the headline, it also fondly reminds me of reading Slashdot in the late 90s-early 00s, back before the Internet and programming and computers had all gone to shit. Good luck guys. At least working on this for decades is less damaging to the world than anything people do at Google and Facebook.

I always liked reading about it in uni in the mid-late 00s. It made me feel smart in my OS tutorials when I could rattle off all the design choices and how they differed from Linux and Windows

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#22

Post by pjmlp »

wolvoleo wrote: post #16
hgs3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s. It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.

True but it's not exactly new. I remember Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvald's heated discussions in the early 90s :) Minix featured a microkernel before linux existed.

Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#24

Post by bcrl »

pjmlp wrote: post #22
wolvoleo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but it's not exactly new. I remember Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvald's heated discussions in the early 90s :) Minix featured a microkernel before linux existed.

Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....

Given the tectonic shift in priorities for Linux kernel development over the past decade, I'm willing to bet that many key developers would be open to a microkernel architecture now than ~25+ years ago. CPUs now have hardware features that reduce the overhead of MMU context changes which gets rid of a significant part of the cost of having isolated address spaces to contain code. The Meltdown and Spectre attacks really forced the security issue to the point where major performance costs to improve security became acceptable in a way that was not the case in the '90s or '00s.
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