It's _still_ pointless. There's no chance of displacing Linux or the BSDs in practical terms, and there's no particularly interesting ideas in it. We already know you can build a Unix on top of a microkernel and it will sorta work.

Enough, already. Kill this late-1980s design and build something interesting already. Surely at least one of the things that have happened between 1990-2011 in hardware, software and networking warrants a rethink of OS assumptions rather than this stale rehashing?

Try new ideas, prove them with a large audience and see what you can get from them.

One of these days someone will come up with the idea that replaces Unix. Didn't happen until now, but the only way to be sure it never happens is to stop trying new ideas.

That these technologies were highly modular, focused on a simple core, emerged as an independent (an unauthorized) side project at AT&T, and were immediately adapted and extended by the academic and research communities?

The principle change that's come about in the descendant / inspired instances present today is that there's a strong assurance that the license of these projects is and will remain free, allowing, say, independent entities, individuals, and organizations to try new ideas, prove them with a large audience, and see what you can get from them.

There will be an idea that replaces Unix. I don't know what it will be. However, it will be called Unix.

It's meaningful, I agree, but I get the same feeling when I drive my car running on an internal combustion engine (although my car runs on ethanol) that my grandfather would easily recognize and, quite possibly, be able to repair.

Most of what's happening on the Web right now (as cool as it is) is enabled more from increases in compute power, speed, interconnects, bandwidth (rate/volume of access), and connectivity (persistence/ease of access), but not from any inherent lack of vision in a prior age.

And when I say "a prior age", I'm not talking about the 90s, 80s, or 50s. Try 19th century (Jeremy Bentham, Jules Verne). Or the 10th century (1001 Arabian Nights has some cool stuff in it). Or Roman, Greek, Biblical, or Egyptian eras.

Drag yourself off to an ancient history museum sometime. You'll find items there that you use daily, or at least are very, very familiar with, from literally thousands of years ago: tweezers, dice, mirrors, bracelets, Egyptian sand toilets (a large stone seat over a box in the ground).

"Old" isn't synonymous with "tired" in technology. Particularly for tools which are in continuous use and evolution, it means "tried, true, tested, and refined". There's a law of diminishing returns, and of asymptotic convergence on an ideal.

I'd love to see the ICE replaced by something cleaner, more energy efficient, and more sustainable. People have tried for nearly 150 years, and I've been a fan of several alternatives (alternate fuel, Wankel, gas turbine, steam, electric) at various times. With the exception of the Wankel, all of those were present at the time the ICE emerged.

So much for innovation, eh?

A car is not an evolved horse, and, while we were stuck with horses for centuries, we did invent better means of transportation.

We kept the four wheels, steering, and even the dashboard (you know where that term comes from, right?). The only thing replaced was the prime mover.

That's admittedly an oversimplification, but if you look at early cars, the were called ... what was it again? Oh yeah: horseless carriages.

Neat stuff: rack and pinion, you know, we use it for steering? Leonardi da Vinci used it, though it dates from far before then.

The real innovations for the car were incremental increases in metalurgy (allowing creation of efficient engines), machining, and the availability of cheap, plentiful, portable, and dense energy sources (petroleum).

Much of the advances of the 19th and 20th century is attributable to increased available energy, compounded and confounded with technological increases allowing better and more useful use of that energy.

I believe it will rather build atop of it, maybe changing it slightly. Sort of like OOP & functional didn't replace structural/procedural programming - both paradigms still use procedures and both changed them slightly to suit their ways.

Regardless, I feel like these devs are working towards something worthwhile, even if only they benefit from the experience (as they imply in the article, they've already directly benefited from their free work, good for them!). Is there some sort of opportunity cost that I'm not aware of here? Could we say that they should be working on developing a driver for the latest Nvidia graphics card for the Linux kernel instead? Would more people benefit from that? In the next sixty months, probably, in the next sixty years, it's a lot harder to say...

If 999 programmers decide to work on 999 basically identical Soduku solvers, and 1 programmer decides to hack up a novel object recognition system with OpenCV, and all 1000 guys are equally keen on their own projects, we'll just have to all agree that all thousand projects are equally interesting and call it a day.

I care because it's wasted effort that would be better spent elsewhere.

"I care because it's wasted effort that would be better spent elsewhere."

This idea that programmers must somehow "donate their free-time to the betterment of society" or whatever the hell you are suggesting is frankly quite offensive.

If I spent my off-hours building, say, a slightly different clone of Java that I'd started in 1996, you'd be entitled to tell me that I was wasting my time. In fact, this would be doing me a service. If I couldn't turn around and say, "well, Onanva is different from Java because of interesting features X, Y and Z" or "Onanva is about to take over from Java because I've got 100K users in beta and they're screaming for a commercial version" or whatever, then I'd have some serious introspection to do. What I wouldn't do is go into a screaming frenzy that someone who is "sitting on their ass" (whatever that means) is disparaging my precious, precious work and start running around with my dress over my head.

I can't tell from your profiles whether you or Mr P9 have ever been in an environment where you get asked tough questions, but any decent CS school will make you run the "why is this interesting/useful" gauntlet repeatedly, especially if you want to get a PhD or something silly like that. The bulk of the cruel, cruel people who ask you these terrible questions will do so from a seated position, and it will be imperative on you to harden up and supply answers. Not every hobbyist has to deal with this sort of thing, but not everyone outside industry or academic research is incapable of doing so; see also Young Torvalds vs. Tanenbaum for a less pathetic approach to criticism.

Programmers are free to do whatever they want; I doubt that a better OS will have much to do with the "betterment of society" in any case (you're not sure what I'm suggesting, but you're sure it's "quite offensive"). IMO they should work on projects that are objectively interesting. It's ok to disagree on what that might be, but no-one has been able to furnish a reason why building a UNIX clone on top of Mach (again, after cycling through several other underlying microkernels) is in fact interesting in 2011.

What you are doing is simply being an asshole.

"IMO they should work on projects that are objectively interesting."

I rest my case. If you have a better idea of what they should be doing, pay them to do it. Don't tell anyone what they should or should not do otherwise.

Furthermore, my background, p9idf's background, and the PhD process all have fuck all to do with what other people do with their own free time.

As a rule academics, writers, artists and critics (for example) have all felt reasonably empowered to say all sorts of things about each other - often in language that would make my 'why is this interesting' stuff seem positively tame - without giving undue weight to the fact that the target of the criticism could be otherwise spending time watching soccer or masturbating. When I got my ass rightfully handed to me for trying to get a mediocre paper into SIGMETRICS a few years back, not one reviewer made positive mention of the fact that at least I was writing lousy papers as opposed to, say, punching people on the street or making a color-sorted collection of my nose pickings.

Casual internet forum judgements are worth very little, and one can ignore them one sees fit. I don't remember the bit where I proposed making further research on the Hurd illegal or running them out of town on a rail. One might even muster up a coherent argument against such judgements that doesn't depend on the All Important Right of Enthusiasts to Exist in a Plane Above All Comment on the Relevance of their Work.

And in the real world, you are an asshole. It's not namecalling, it's an assessment of your character.

Everybody needs a hobby, don't judge him on his.

OK, who here programs standing up? It's certainly possible at this point.

Too bad it's not your effort that's being used. If you want things you find interesting (and seemingly no one else do) you've got to be prepared to do them yourself.

I sorta agree.

I particularly would like to see operating systems implemented using JIT compilation and software isolation. Managed code running safely on the ring0 of the processor.

Microsoft Singularity started this but I'd like to see the open source people trying something like that! I really think we need processor/architecture independency if we really want to achieve freedom.

Lisp Machines were arguably like this, except with microcode instead of JIT. AS/400 (IBM midrange systems, now called System i) does something like this as well, except the whole program is compiled from bytecode to machine code on first run, or whenever the bytecode on disk is newer than the machine code on disk.

The biggest change is that you have either a trusted compiler, a garbage collector in the kernel, or both.

We used to joke about governmental 'Stop Grants' at our startup to match the 'Start Grants'. The idea would be that they would pay you to "please, just go away".

http://www.archhurd.org/

I installed it on VirtualBox. Smelled like Unix.

It's sort of funny how the major kernels are primarily monolithic (please correct me if I'm wrong wrt recent versions of Windows), but academic research says microkernels are better. Worse is better? First-mover advantage?

Either way I'm interested to see if HURD will ever take off in any real sense. For example, could we see an Ubuntu/HURD mix in 5 or 10 years? Will it even matter with that kind of timeframe? Would there ever be any practical advantage to use HURD vs Linux besides more "freedoms"?

that's true, but the "security" is not really what we perceive in the post-google, massively distributed era.

microkernels made sense back when key to uptime was hot-swappable devices. e.g. if your nic goes awry due to a hardware problem, it can crash its driver. in case of a monolithic kernel, this would in turn crash the os, whereas with a microkernel, the rest of the system should continue humming just fine. this makes replacing the failed component possible without causing downtime by shutting down the single node the service runs on.

but nowadays, we know how to set up systems so that taking down an entire node (gasp!) won't harm the operation of the service as a whole. so i don't think microkernels are that relevant anymore.

The problem with microkernels is their advantages (in terms of, a component of the kernel crashing won't take down the box) has rarely been worth it in light of the disadvantages (all that message passing hurts performance). So "better" depends on your POV.

I think we would see different comments if the HURD were performing reasonably and AWS ran it.

Having said that, the speed at which the project moves does not help its cause.

For a brief shining moment, it was open source. It's legacy is very interesting, worth a read to see just how far the little OS that could has come along since it first ran on PDAs. In fact, it's atypical architecture gives Symbian some advantages over contemporary OSes in terms of absurdly low power and CPU requirements. It is also quite secure, offering granular security settings for almost anything - the only Symbian malware that ever made the news were those that the user installed him/herself. Sadly this also gives it a very complex programming model (for example, it uses an obscure variant of C; also many basic services like audio need to be accessed through a server running on device) and a difficult threading model. Qt provides a beautiful API that wraps over the native layer these days, but it seems it's simply not fashionable among the majority of developers.

(BTW, cross-compiling the entire system is tons of fun — for cross-gcc you want libc, but to compile libc you need cross-gcc)

Also, our usernames are alarmingly similar in this font.

That, OTOH, may explain low productivity by its developers.

And in the past decade, there have been more promising microkernels, like L4. Unless I missed something and there's still a good reason for Hurd to still be using Mach.