Re: GnuHurd

[Marco Gerards]

Jose Luis Alarcon Sanchez <jlalarcon@gawab.com> writes:

> On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 23:27 +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
>> GNUMach is slow and not very reliable, so the Hurd
>> developers are currently working on replacing GNUMach by an L4 microkernel.
>>
> Can you explain more deeply why "GNUMach is slow and not very
> reliable"?.

First about the speed.  GNU/Hurd is a multiserver OS on top of a
microkernel.  It uses a lot of RPC instead of syscalls.  On Mach
IPC/task switching is not as fast as it should be for the approach
taken for GNU/Hurd.

GNU Mach is not that reliable as Jose said, it crashes a lot (once a
day for me).  The memory management routines have bugs and can make
your box crash.  I really hope someone wants to fix this.

With L4 Hurd all these problems should be fixed, at least that is the
plan :).  The main issue is that L4 Hurd is far from usable.  So if
someone wants to work on GNU/Hurd, fixing GNU Mach is still an
important task.  And you can implement new features on GNU/Hurd (on
top of GNU Mach) which will remain usable after porting to L4.

--
Marco