This headline was pretty much true 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago...
Don't get me wrong, I think Hurd is interesting, but I seriously doubt it's going to have a big impact on anything as it reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.
It is barely distinguishable from the first slide featured in the Phoronix article from today: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2026&image=gnu_hurd_1 It seems like there has been progress on other fronts, so I'm not sure why Phoronix ran a headline focused on very old news.
> reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.
It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.
True but it's not exactly new. I remember Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvald's heated discussions in the early 90s :) Minix featured a microkernel before linux existed.
Yeah, but we are still far off making it mainstream beyond some key use cases, QNX, INTEGRITY, language runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, all kernel extension points being pushed into userspace across Apple,Google,Microsoft offerings, Nintendo Switch,....
While I laughed at the headline, it also fondly reminds me of reading Slashdot in the late 90s-early 00s, back before the Internet and programming and computers had all gone to shit.
Good luck guys. At least working on this for decades is less damaging to the world than anything people do at Google and Facebook.
I always liked reading about it in uni in the mid-late 00s. It made me feel smart in my OS tutorials when I could rattle off all the design choices and how they differed from Linux and Windows
To be fair, GNU/Linux distros like Debian lean very heavily on the GNU part. They owe a lot to the GSF and its work is highly praised.
Just their kernel somehow seems to be stuck in vaporware status. Probably because a lot of developers would think "why work on this when we already have Linux" which is a fair point too.
I wonder if microkernels more relevant now than ever given their reduced attack surface, and also the recent availability of more cores.
One big criticism from decades ago was the loss in efficiency. But what's changed since microkernels were conceived is how many processor cores are available to offload userspace drivers from the kernel.
Is this a valid viewpoint? Is it time for microkernels to overtake monolithic kernels?
Don't get me wrong, I think Hurd is interesting, but I seriously doubt it's going to have a big impact on anything as it reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.