David Brodbeck wrote:
On Jul 24, 2007, at 8:34 AM, Kent West wrote:It'd be nice if a coder of Con's caliber were to get interested in the HURD. I think that project has a lot of potential, but I'm afeared it has little future without some motivated developers.HURD kind of suffers from being late to the party. It would have to offer something really new and exciting to pull people away from Linux and BSD, I think.To me it always smacked a little of "me-too-ism", too ... the GNU folks felt Linux wasn't GNU-ish enough, so they had to go write their own kernel.
It's my understanding that the Hurd pre-dates Linux; it's just that once Linux came along, the development on it moved at a much faster pace than on the Hurd, and Debian was ported to run on it while the Hurd project languished.
For those not up on the project, as I understand things...Debian is an entire OS that can (at least theoretically) run on top of a number of different kernels. It originally was to run on the GNU Mach kernel as part of the Hurd project, but then Linux came along and outpaced Hurd development, so Linux became the new underlying kernel for mainstream Debian.
The big difference between Linux and the GNU Mach kernel is that with Linux, many things (hardware drivers, file system drivers, etc) are integrated into the kernel, whereas with a micro-kernel architecture like GNU Mach, the kernel is just a very small core piece of code, and then the drivers, etc are attached as "servers" (sort of like inserting a module into the Linux kernel, but different). These servers are more modular than Linux kernel modules, and can be attached by normal users rather than requiring admin access, because the modularity prevents them from tromping on each other.
Of course, I probably don't really understand things .... -- Kent