Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
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Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#2It sank like a turd.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#3For those interested, Debian is planning on releasing a Hurd variant just like they did with kFreeBSD.
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/index
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#4An 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.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#5Can anyone tell me how computing would be different today if micro kernels had taken off? If everyone working on Linux had been working on Gnu Hurd?
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#6Can anyone tell me how computing would be different today if micro kernels had taken off? If everyone working on Linux had been working on Gnu Hurd?
Then everyone would have ran BSD.
(J/K)
Micro kernels are very hard to debug.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#7Note: RMS think Linux is "good enough" and Linux-libre is part of GNU, so Linux will be used for the in-development official GNU "distro".
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#8Can anyone tell me how computing would be different today if micro kernels had taken off? If everyone working on Linux had been working on Gnu Hurd?
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.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#9An 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.
It's easy (and legitimate) to blame the failure of Hurd on poor design and management choices.
I think it's also instructive, though, to observe how no "better than Unix" project has really attained any success. Some of them have delivered more workable code than Hurd, but Plan 9, Inferno, Amoeba - none of them have really caught on.
Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
#10For those interested, Debian is planning on releasing a Hurd variant just like they did with kFreeBSD. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/index
Is anyone using Debian/kFreeBSD for serious workloads?