Tom: >> Yes, Hurd reached for a platonic ideal and good for them but it >> wasn't a very practical approach.
Alfred: > I'd like to see some backup for the claim that the Hurd isn't a very > practical approach. I know for a fact that the hurd is actually very > practical. It's too off topic for prolonged discussion on this list, imo, but you could look at the Wikipedia articles on Mach, L4, and the GNU hurd, find RMS' retrospective comments that his original thought was that the hurd could be completed quickly, note the lack of device drivers, and ask what exactly people would really want that functionality for. If you want to make a fast, modular OS with such radically different capabilities there are prbly better approaches. Build a lisp OS or something. I'd handwavingly suggest that in the early days the Hurd did have a serious chance at big impact. If it had beat Linux to the punch people may indeed have swallowed the performance issues in exchange for a flexible, free kernel. But it didn't, not even close, so we can only guess what might have happened. -t _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
