It sank like a turd.
Turds float.
... like a coprolite?
Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#22An oft-quoted phrase that applies here is "the enemy of good is 'better'". Clearly RMS wanted his idea of perfection, and almost 30 years on, perfection remains out of reach while "good enough" rules the world on Linux. An important lesson to learn.
Worse is better: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#23Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not very different, since we're basically doing microkernel-y things anyway using various kinds of virtualization. It would probably be more elegant to just run Hurd or whatever instead of for example running multiple JVMs on top of multiple Linux instances on top of a hypervisor (yes, this happens), but them's the breaks.
Well, people are still working on the problem. You can run some runtimes directly on Xen, like the JVM and Haskell. http://labs.oracle.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=185 http://readwrite.com/2010/11/30/haskell-virtual-machine
Is this comparable to eLua?
http://www.eluaproject.net/home/overview
EDIT: I found this on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aXsutL4rQ
I was interested in this a while back, but never took the plunge. Seems you can run it in an 'emulator' on i386.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#25Can someone explain to me if the problem with Hurd was that the basic idea was impossible, or it was the way they went about it? i.e. was it the relentless restarting of the project that was to blame, or did they keep restarting because every way they approached it turned out to be impossible?
Microkernels were an immensely popular idea in academia (Mach, Minix, …) when Hurd was begun; I don't think the fundamental problem with them — performance is horrible — had been made obvious yet. Microkernel design is probably a good idea, but the message passing overhead kills actual microkernel implementations.
I've heard the Windows NT kernel described as being designed like a microkernel architecture (separate modules with clear APIs), but with direct function calls instead of message passing. I don't know if the Linux/BSD kernels are much different — I've poked at all three, and at a high level they look very similar.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly unix derivatives are now some of the most popular operating systems for modern devices, as iOS, Mac OS, and Android are unix/linux based.
I thought XNU was considered a micro-kernel because of the Mach part.
To quote that bastion of Jimmy Wales:
"Although Mach is often mentioned as one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, not all versions of Mach are microkernels.
The project at Carnegie Mellon ran from 1985 to 1994, ending in apparent failure with Mach 3.0, which was finally a true microkernel.
Mach and its derivatives are in use in a number of commercial operating systems, … most notably Mac OS X using the XNU operating system kernel which incorporates an earlier (non-microkernel) Mach as a major component.
Neither Mac OS X nor FreeBSD maintain the microkernel structure pioneered in Mach."[0]
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#27Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#28Can someone explain to me if the problem with Hurd was that the basic idea was impossible, or it was the way they went about it? i.e. was it the relentless restarting of the project that was to blame, or did they keep restarting because every way they approached it turned out to be impossible?
Microkernels were an immensely popular idea in academia (Mach, Minix, …) when Hurd was begun; I don't think the fundamental problem with them — performance is horrible — had been made obvious yet. Microkernel design is probably a good idea, but the message passing overhead kills actual microkernel implementations. I've heard the Windows NT kernel described as being designed like a microkernel architecture (separate m…
The message passing overhead issues have been successfully addressed.
http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4/ http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/Heiser_08lca.sl...
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microkernels were an immensely popular idea in academia (Mach, Minix, …) when Hurd was begun; I don't think the fundamental problem with them — performance is horrible — had been made obvious yet. Microkernel design is probably a good idea, but the message passing overhead kills actual microkernel implementations. I've heard the Windows NT kernel described as being designed like a microkernel architecture (separate m…
The message passing overhead issues have been successfully addressed. http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4/ http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/Heiser_08lca.sl...
Thanks for that. The PDF and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family were both fascinating.
I then read a bit about an attempt to port Hurd to L4, which floundered for reasons which are beyond my understanding.