KernelTrap Talks WIth GNU/Hurd Developer Neal Walfield

An Anonymous Coward writes: "One of the GNU/Hurd developers, Neal Walfield, was recently interviewed by KernelTrap. Nice read."

Comments

Using the HURD in production

[Walter Bell]

My employer likes to stay on the leading edge in the operating systems field, and makes it a point to try to integrate up-and-coming technologies into our server farms. It should come as no surprise, then, that our team does use a HURD machine as a file/web/application server.

The HURD machine has been surprisingly stable since we set it up last year. We may have had a few instances where it would get into an undesirable state and need rebooting, but by and large its downtime has been attributable to hardware upgrades and power interruptions. Its integrated userspace/kernel space has provoked us to write some very interesting programs on that box that we would not have been able to create with an ordinary UNIX or clone.

What's interesting about the HURD is that, despite its departures from many UNIX conventions, its developers are striving to form a clean upgrade path from Linux to HURD. Likewise, many HURD features (like POSIX b.1 capabilities) have made it into Linux in recent years. It's too early to tell, but perhaps the future holds a merging of Linux with HURD in a couple of years.

~wally

The HURD could be in public use today

[Jack Wagner]

When I was doing some contractor work for a huge *nix shop (think purple)I met a fellow who told me an interesting tale. It seems this huge *nix company (think purple) had actually spent a week with RMS and some of the HURD developers to talk with them about using the base code from the HURD for a project they were kicking about. The company would have been willing to give back some of the code, under a community type BSD license, which would have brought the HURD up to a Version 1.0 level. Now bear in mind I got this story second hand but the guy who told me was a very reputable source who had been part of the compiler team for years there. He let it slip out while we were discussing the flaws in the BSD threading model and once the cat was out of the bag he spilled his guts.

Anyways, the long and the short of it was that RMS threw a giant hissy fit about the license so they never did business together. It seems that RMS can't see the forrest for the trees sometimes. Instead of giving the community a rock-n-roll new kernel, he decided to cut off his nose to spite his face.

Yours,
-Jack