On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 10:44:50PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
Jeroen Dekkers jeroen@dekkers.cx wrote:
IMHO Linux is already a high-profile snub for Free Software and GNU.
Why? Without it, GNU softwares would not have as many users as they do.
The whole BK thing is just another reason to dislike Linux for me. (Most of the other reasons are technical)
If you're talking general about the microkernel vs hybrid-monolithic, isn't that debate still open? In *theory* micro should win, but in practice, most of the successful ones are hybrids at the moment.
If you mean with "hybrid" a monolithic kernel with modules, that's still monolithic. Even a single server running on a microkernel is monolithic. The Hurd is a multi-server system, giving each server its own process. This gives you stability, security and makes it easier to debug it.
If you're talking about general crap in some of the code, then I'm sure certain pieces of GNU software can be found to have the same...
Oh yes, GNU tar for example. Also gnumach is very old and ugly code in a lot of places. But the Hurd itself is really clean, as is glibc.
I would also like to warn you that the current version of the Hurd isn't really useful in a production environment. There are going to happen big changes in the near future which would really improve the system.
I guess this is why there aren't more users. Can you point me to a good starting point for finding out more, warts and all?
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. We don't have enough manpower to really get the Hurd in a good state and people aren't going to use/develop it because of the problems.
I suggest you start with http://hurd.gnu.org and if you want to install the Hurd you should read http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd (note however that we are going to recompile the whole archive because of a libc ABI change, we haven't build packages for months). There is not very much documentation, but at least the code is well commented.
Our biggest problem is manpower [...]
Well, it is difficult to help without a system to help on. Does there exist something similar to Xnest or User Mode Linux to test on? Can any of the virtual machine solutions host it? Are there people in experience in running it like that?
Yes, we already had that from the beginning, it's part of the Hurd's design. Because the Hurd runs in user-space on a microkernel, you can just start a subhurd using the boot program. You can debug the Hurd servers with gdb just like any other program. You also don't need any special rights to start a Hurd server, you can just do it as a normal user.
The Hurd also runs in bochs. The last time I tried it didn't work on plex86, I will try to get it working as soon as I've time to do it.
Jeroen Dekkers