There's been quite a few hurd articles lately. I wonder what the interest is?
Maybe focusing on only the drivers needed to make it run well in VMware or openbox would improve the usability story. I've always thought it was interesting, but a lot of people wrote it off after linux took off. I can't help but think that hardware performance has improved to the point that the supposed perf penalties of microkernels wouldn't matter.
The performance penalties aren't intrinsic to microkernels, so much as to Mach because of the heavyweight RPC mechanism and its elaborate port right and type checking of messages. L4 calls are actually really fast precisely because such policy is left to userland.
Debian GNU/Hurd runs really well under virtualization, btw.
I certainly don't want to rehash some of the arguments about it, because I wasn't a fan of them at the time...but I was referring to the context switch penalty of running multiple system level services is separate processes.
Mind you, I've always thought that argument was specious for several reasons...but in a naive implementation breaking a kernel unto multiple processes would have to have higher context switch overhead.
I've always though, though, that not everything needs to be process isolated, and using more of a message pass system could probably overcome context switch overhead in multiprocessor system's
EDIT: GOD DAAMN PHONE. I think that the reliability gains may more than make up for any perf problems.
Can't read the 84 pages now but if I'm not mistaken Hurd and L4 are both (micro)kernels. I don't understand what it means to port a kernel to another kernel.
It would have made sense for me if they had ported the GNU tools to work with L4.
Maybe focusing on only the drivers needed to make it run well in VMware or openbox would improve the usability story. I've always thought it was interesting, but a lot of people wrote it off after linux took off. I can't help but think that hardware performance has improved to the point that the supposed perf penalties of microkernels wouldn't matter.