Re: [OT] HURD vs Linux/HURD

Larry McVoy
2003-07-19T18:30:59Z

On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 07:41:23PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:12:49AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > The microkernel part of any reasonable microkernel is tiny.
>
> And who says Mach is a reasonable microkernel :)

Yup, more like a maxikernel :)

That was my reaction on reading the code years ago and it hasn't changed.
I used to know one of the main guys who did the QNX microkernel (Dan
Hildebrandt, RIP 1998) and he talked about how a real microkernel was
never touched by more than 3 people and each of them spent as much
time removing stuff as adding it.

Mach is kinda on the bloated side, I always questioned the wisdom of
the GNU HURD being based on Mach, seemed like a bad call. But then,
unless you have an extremely well controlled dev team, any micro kernel
is a bad call, it's going to bloat out.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm