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
