Hurd/L4 Developer Marcus Brinkmann Interviewed

wikinerd writes "A few years ago when the GNU OS was almost complete, the kernel was the last missing piece, and most distributors combined GNU with the Linux kernel. But the GNU developers continued their efforts and unveiled the Hurd in 1990s, which is currently a functioning prototype. After the Mach microkernel was considered insufficient, some developers decided to start a new project porting the Hurd on the more advanced L4 microkernel using cutting-edge operating system design, thus creating the Hurd/L4. Last February one of the main developers, Marcus Brinkmann, completed the process initialization code and showed a screenshot of the first program executed on Hurd/L4 saying 'The dinner is prepared!' Now he has granted an interview about Hurd/L4, explaining the advantages of microkernels, the Hurd/L4 architecture, the project's goals and how he started the Debian port to Hurd."

Comments

And how long have they been working on this?

[Noose For A Neck]

What a waste of time. What are they trying to accomplish by still working on the HURD? Linux has already far surpassed it in every catagory (hardware support, software support, usability, performance, etc.) and is just as Free as the HURD, so what gives?

On the other hand, I guess I'm not the only one of this mind, as it obviously wouldn't have taken 20 years to get to the point where a program can finally run on it if everybody else with development skills didn't also believe it a total waste of their time.

When are they gonna let this go

[Timesprout]

A project started in 1983 and only now starting to show any signs of deliverables! Just let it go. It might be a cool idea but it should be pretty obvious by now there is little or no intrest in it if 20 years of development have only gotten this far.

Re:When are they gonna let this go

[mattyrobinson69]

not far off now! if they can make a program run for more than 5 minutes, they've far suppassed windows 98.

Re:GNU

[CondeZer0]

I think that project is obsoleted by plan9port.

Why have a userspace based in a 30 years old dead[1] operating system, when you can have the userspace from it's successor that is actively maintained, and was developed by the same team following the same principles and philosophy.

[1] "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." -- Rob Pike circa 1991

Re:GNU

[anothy]

...the science of operating systems isn't very interesting anymore...

this is true in the sense that there is very little of interest being done in this realm; this is entirely false in the sense that there are lots of interesting problems to solve and questions to answer. linux is doing nothing to answer them (with a few very specific examples). inferno and plan 9 are the most interesting in this regard that i'm aware of, and they're pushing "the science of operating systems" substantially farther than Linux even thinks about, with very good results.

Re:uh... wrong

[anothy]

i will certainly concede that various vendors have, at various times, left their own OSs in a pretty poor state. i've been particularly frustrated with HP-UX and AIX, but specifics aside, your point stands.

this does not, however, mean the GNU stuff is scientifically interesting. the fact that they've managed to copy the better portions of existing Unix tools, rather than the more archaic portions, does not make them innovative. and having admin'd more Unix flavors and derivatives than i care to list or anyone cares to read, the most consistently frustrating parts of getting things to work in a portable fashion is the hackish approach to portability popularized by GNU (witness autoconf/configure), non-standard extensions to existing languages and utilities (gmake, gawk, gcc's C extensions), and errors in gcc, particularly in the optimizations.