Re: What is hurd?
>
> I've browsed through the Hurd faq, but I'm still not clear exactly what
> advantages Hurd has over the Linux kernel. The FSF say that when they
> decided to continue Hurd development in 1990 once they heard about Linux,
> Linux was not portable and didn't scale well (esp. to multiprocessor
> machines). That's not true anymore (although maybe the Hurd can do it
> better?).
I guess if you had been busy with such a project for years, you might
want to finish it too. Besides that, I'd say that diversity is a Good
Thing. There may be a point in the future you'd like to do something
for which the hurd is better suited. Also, since both linux and hurd
are GPL-ed, they can interchange code and learn from each other.
> The Hurd uses the Mach microkernel: microkernels are supposedly more
> efficient, but somewhere I read (I vaguely think it was by Linus, arguing
> with Tanenbaum about whether Minix was superior to Linux) that in the Real
> World, microkernels aren't as superior to monolithic kernels as they are
> theoretically supposed to be. Also, loadable modules give Linux some of
> the flexibility of microkernels.
A very interesting and important difference as far as I understand it,
is that _users_ may write, compile and install there own drivers into
the kernel, without becoming root or rebooting, and without affecting
the drivers used by others on the system. This goes as far as
giving the possibility to provide different OS environments to
different users, so in theory you could have `windows98' and `linux'
running at the same time on the same machine without the kind of
overhead you'd expect from an emulator.
> If anyone's keen to enlighten me/us on the intracacies of operating system
> kernels, they might like to comment on cached microkernels, like what the
> freedows project uses (www.freedows.org), or what the essential
> differences are between the Linux and BSD kernels.
Some time ago there was a discussion on slashdot about freedows.
Apparently at the time no actual coding had happened, and many people
who entered the project had left it again already. From the discussion
I gathered it is mostly vaporware. Since the hurd is now actually
running, it may provide a more realistic route towards the goals of the
freedows project.
Eric Meijer
--
E.L. Meijer (tgakem@chem.tue.nl) | tel. office +31 40 2472189
Eindhoven Univ. of Technology | tel. lab. +31 40 2475032
Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (TAK) | tel. fax +31 40 2455054
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