[linux] Distro/Unix flavor survey

[Jeff Frasca]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Peter Woodman wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2005, at 11:16 PM, Andrew P. Becherer wrote:
>
>> On Apr 19, 2005, at 11:07 PM, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> 
>>>  True. OS X Tiger's coming up next week... Gotta love Darwin's FreeBSD 
>>> derivative kernel.
>>> 
>> I thought it was a Mach derivative microkernel kernel and a FreeBSD derived 
>> subsystem and userland...
>> 
> You're very correct, there. Darwin is (kind of) what the HURD aimed to be.. 
> i wonder if RMS will ever give up the HURD and put himself behind Darwin 
> (HURD is kind of hopeless..)

I doubt that RMS is ever going to back Darwin over HURD.

HURD is a true microkernel design, where NeXT and OSX are not.  The idea 
being that NeXT and OSX (and others) only have one server running on Mach 
(in the case of OSX, this is a port of the FreeBSD kernel).

HURD, on the other hand, splits the design and runs multiple servers over 
the microkernel.  So, the virtual file system might be provided by one server, 
or a small collection of servers, while the networking stack is in another 
server.  This granularity is supposed to increase reliability and 
maintainability (bad networking driver?  Restart the server when it crashes, 
you haven't taken the whole system down).

HURD is a much more ambitious design than OSX/Darwin.  I think they should 
keep working at it.  We have many kernels that work for today's needs, but 
HURD promises to be a next generation design.  I think it has its place and 
will have its day in the sun.

In the meantime, we have Linux and the *BSD kernels to play with.  For the 
brave, there's a HURD Live CD (find it at http://www.superunprivileged.org).
I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet.

Jeff

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