First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD

wikinerd writes "The GNU Project was working on a new OS kernel called HURD from 1990, using the GNU Mach microkernel. However, when HURD-Mach was able to run a GUI and a browser, the developers decided to start from scratch and port the project to the high-performance L4 microkernel. As a result development was slowed by years, but now HURD developer Marcus Brinkmann made a historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4. He says: 'We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!'"

Comments

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[m50d]

Linux doesn't work that well. No, hear me out. The design isn't very good, and it's starting to show. The fact that you need to be root to mount things, and the trouble with reiser4, are showing the flaws in the VFS layer. The confusion over what belongs in the SCSI subsystem, with atapi cd drives being moved out of it because linus doesn't like them there but everything else being rapidly moved in there, betrays deeper problems - I have been told that the scsi subsystem should be used for everything, but since the IDE one was put together first for linus' cheap hardware, ide uses that. And yet some things are being moved into the ide subsystem, and the scsi one is not as nice as it could be if it was moved up a layer where it seems to belong. This is because linux wasn't properly designed. It was always meant to be a temporary kludge, something to work until a proper replacement came along. So some design decisions were badly made from a long term point of view, and some weren't made at all, just sort of emerged as an imperfect compromise. The problems are becoming more and more evident, and it's getting to the stage where we need a replacement.