Microkernels (was Re: Sparc port?)
OBdisclaimer: I am trying to get some ideas going here. I'm not trolling,
not writing flamebait.
I (and some other Cambridge people) am of the opinion that the current
hurd doesn't get the maximum benefit out of it's microkernel design, and
one of the reasons is that its microkernel is not very micro. Sure, Mach
is smaller than linux, but it's still pretty big. I think this is because
it tries to do too much: things like IDE, SCSI and so on should IMHO be
servers: the microkernel should do as little as possible (in the way
networking is handling, for example). I understand it would be rather a
lot of work to re-implement mach in this manner (though I dare say most of
the existing code could be kept/moved into hurd servers), but I think it
might be worth it in the long run....
Just a thought,
Matthew
--
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo
Steward of the Cambridge Tolkien Society
Selwyn College Computer Support
http://www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/Societies/tolkien/
http://pick.sel.cam.ac.uk/
Debian GNU/Hurd - love at first byte
Reply to: