Re: Fan mail about the Hurd...

[Ognyan Kulev]

Wolfgang Jaehrling wrote:
> Also keep in mind that there *are* Linux developers (like Alan Cox)
> who say quite intelligent and fair things about the Hurd.

I was curious what Alan Cox says about the Hurd and found this one[1]:

emil asks:

While I realize that you might not be completely objective about this 
question, what do you think of the design of the HURD, as it compares to 
Linux?

I once asked Linus himself this question and he replied in rather 
annoyed tones that "the HURD is a great academic design that would never 
work in practice" (or something along those lines).

Richard Stallman has been steadfast in refusing to endorse Linux as the 
GNU kernel. Does he raise these objections merely for emotional reasons, 
or does he see the HURD as having real technical advantages to the 
current monolithic design?

Alan Answers:

HURD is a great concept. Like most great concepts it isnt efficiently 
implementable I suspect. Hurd is a GNU vision and every project needs 
some lofty probably unachievable goal.

The HURD design is more about Richard Stallman's ideas about how a 
system should work to promote community than about high perfomance OS 
design. Linux is a bit more pragmatic about things. We took ideas from 
the microkernel world (like loadable device drivers) but we didn't take 
the accompanying partitioning and performance loss.

HURD is a rich flexible environment where the user has a lot of power to 
say "no I don't like that, I'll write my own code and use it" - even for 
things like filesystems. Right now HURD is a research project. Maybe one 
day it will become a useful OS.

[1] http://slashdot.org/interviews/99/09/03/1015250.shtml

Regards
--
Ognyan Kulev <ogi@fmi.uni-sofia.bg>, "\"Programmer\""