Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 18:22:53 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Anyone tried HURD yet? Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.94.960925180852.2164B-100000@covina.lightside.com>
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In August, the FSF released a public version of HURD, "_the_ GNU OS." Briefly, it is a Mach microkernel (based on Mach 4 from the Univ. of Utah) with a number of servers to handle the various responsibilities a monolithic UNIX kernel would perform. The user-level utilities are all GNU (of course), however other than supporting ext2fs (in addition to FFS), there appear to be no special concessions to the Linux crowd. Anyway, after I finish building FreeBSD-current, I'm going to try to install the HURD on a spare FFS partition which is temporarily being used for /usr/obj. I'll report my findings when I'm finished. I'm not expecting this to be a full-features OS, so I won't judge it on the same criteria as I would Linux or FreeBSD, but instead, I'm curious as to how architecturally sound it is (i.e. is the poor message-passing performance of Mach 3 apparent?). Architecturally, I feel it is a better approach than MkLinux, which was IMO a desparate attempt from Apple to shoehorn a macrokernel on top of a microkernel in order to make up for the PowerMac's lack of a free UNIX and at the same time capitalize on the Linux and microkernel buzzwords. If anyone else has tried HURD, I'd be interested in your opinions. I'm also curious if anyone is seriously using Lites. As an aside, I currently have _five_ OS's on four partitions of two SCSI hard drives of a single 486: Windows 95, NT, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris/x86, _all_ accessible from BootEasy. Adding HURD would make a grand total of six. Is this some sort of world record? :-) -- Jake
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