From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tanenbaum, OS prof wrote a nice paper that was /.'ed today.
He talked about benefits of microkernels for SECURITY.
(You may have seen his debate with Linus on this topic in early 90s.)
I'm going through his Minix OS now which is designed with
message passing kinda like HURD.
The idea is out there that as CPU speeds get faster and security
become more of a concern....eventually these 2 trends will
cross and microkernels + message passing will come into
fashion.
At that point HURD might have a chance at life and RMS
will finally have a system he can call the GNU system
without any flak like he gets for GNU/Linux!!!
Tannenbaum also thinks a 30% performance hit is acceptable. Maybe for some
enterprises *if* you can prove a reliability increase, but for the vast
majority no. Unless it can be knocked down to 10% or so it won't be
accepted. Even OSX which uses Mach rewrote the message passing to use
function calls (thus making it a macrokernel). Far more likely is you'll
see increased separation of modules and abstraction inside of a macrokernel,
ala VFS and linux modules.
As for HURD- its taken wrong design decision after wrong design decision.
As of a few years ago, it only supports 4GB hard rives because it mem-maps
the entire drive. Forget the fact noone had used a drive that small for a
decade- it was more elegant to write it that way. If that kind of thinking
is endemic to Hurd, it will never be released.
Gabe
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