The Hurd

[Frank Heckenbach]

Marcus Brinkmann wrote:

> And, the past has showed that we are achieving our goals.  For example,
> nobody uses libc5 anymore,

Apparently you missed Alessandro's mail recently ...

Mind you, when you make such statements, don't be surprised when
others claim that nobody needs the Hurd. Both statements are true
... for certain values of nobody ...

> I don't want a graphics driver in the kernel.  I don't want any driver in
> the kernel, to be honest ;)  But having said that, I don't want a webserver
> in the kernel either.  But see, there is a webserver in Linux.  Does that
> make you wonder?  It should.

Actually, it did make me wonder when I read about it. The only
reason seems to be performance, and from the benchmarks it seems to
be much faster than any user-space webserver under certain
conditions. Though I generally prefer elegance of design over
performance when possible, and many "requirements" of performance
are bogus on second sight, there are apparently some who need to
serve large amounts of static web sites. What would you suggest to
them? Buy more hardware? Write a user-space program that side-steps
the OS and talks directly to the hardware (welcome back to Dos ;-)?
Build a bare bones solution that runs without any OS (but what if
some page require CGIs etc. -- serve them from another machine with
an OS running)?

> > Then I hope Hurd is successful. If Hurd and Linux are both successful, there
> > will hopefully be some friendly competition between them.
> 
> Well, that will surely happen.  However, what I would prefer is cooperation,
> rather than competition.

Actually there can be both. Cooperation between the developers
(hopefully), but competition on the user's machines (since most
users will probably run only one OS regularly).

Frank "Another Nobody" Heckenbach

-- 
Frank Heckenbach, frank at g-n-u.de
http://fjf.gnu.de/
GnuPG and PGP keys: http://fjf.gnu.de/plan (7977168E)