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by onan_barbarian
5449 days ago
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Serious question: what's this for? It doesn't seem to be an interesting research project, and shows no sign of being useful in a pragmatic sense. Surely a clean-sheet design started _now_ would be more interesting and perhaps even useful than a 21-year-old microkernel. Think about all the changes in architecture, networks, storage, etc. We're in a world with consumer processors with 4-8 cores and hardware multithreading, GPUs that rival or exceed (in certain domains) the processing grunt of the CPUs, network cards that can talk to L2 cache, SSDs, etc. Surely enough has changed that a clean-sheet design could be a lot more exciting - and even more practical - than trying to finish a design that hasn't succeeded for 2 decades. A clean-sheet design would at least be interesting - we already know you can build a workable system on top of a microkernel. This isn't a claim to know what a clean sheet design would look like; I haven't really looked seriously at OS research in 15 years. I just strongly suspect you might do radically different, interesting designs in 2011 vs 1990. |
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At the end of the day it provides an OS to the FSF which they can control, and which isn't Linux. Even if it was in all ways equal to Linux in performance, and features (which seems doubtful) it's unlikely that it would deploy to any great extent.
Just like ReactOS is pretty much "pointless" (given that Windows costs basically nothing), Hurd is practically pointless because it competes with Linux purely on ideological grounds, and is arguably an inferior product. It simply doesn't have enough differentiating it at this point for anyone to really care.
On the other hand, maybe they'll finish it before I die, and maybe it'll contain some ground-breaking improvement, and we'll all be eating humble pie. Anything is possible. In the meantime if they want to carry on working on it, then good for them. Isn't that what open-source is all about?