[Wolves] HURD

[Stephen Parkes]

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 11:17 +0000, David Goodwin wrote:
> > hurd runs quite well.  The is the rewritten kernels that should run like
> > stink (for micro kernels) in a couple of years.  
> 
> How does it compare to linux as of today however? (or has linux itself 
> become slower over time?)

Big rambling frequently off-topic rant follows ;-)

I think Linux in general has become slower but that's not really a
kernel thing.  The kernel gets better and better and new algorthims mean
it at the core it's faster than ever.

The problem comes with all the crap people run.  It's something I
thought of after the lug meeting last week.  Ron was talking about the
compile times with Gentoo and it hit me it's a sillier thing than I ever
thought it was.

Most Gentoo users are not coming close to good performance because they
just write down the recipes for gcc they see on the forums and compile
away.  They then run ten layers of crap on the top (also not particuly
optimised) and then have several deamons running they never use.

This isn't the case with the Gentoo users we have in the LUG as they are
a pretty proficent bunch and aren't playing follow the leader and making
wild claims about their distro but a dangerous generalisation ;-)

What's the point in optimising Linux then running several services that
are only used once in a while (and over optimising for speed, eating
memory and diskspace as it goes), things like arts, the whole of KDE,
the Mozilla suite, OpenOffice2 and then just browsing a webpage, editing
a text file and listening to the odd mp3.

You can only see the best performance if every part of the puzzle is
working.

I have switched from GNOME back to Rox and from Metacity to OroboROX and
am seeing massive improvements.  This setup isn't for everyone but then
again neither are Linux or HURD ;-)

Performance in HURD will probably never be as good as Linux on the same
system because the internals will slow it down but when it gains
acceptance things like the libc threads and gcc optimisations take this
into account it will transform the performance.  GNU are going to make
sure their own tools perform well on their own kernel ;-)

I can't see us using either of these kernels (on our main workstations)
in the distant future but right now Linux offers the best performance at
this level.  Both are teaching free software developers how to build,
maintain and optimise operating systems and those things will go into
the next generation and the...

The biggest lessons so far have been how to maintain a massive project
when it has an almost infinte number of branches (Linux) and how not
over engineer your solution (HURD v 1).  

It's difficult to see anyone not using GCC these days unless the're
compiling stuff from the vendor of their operating system that won't
work with GNU CC or GMake (Sun et al take a bow) and in the future it'll
be difficult to see people choosing a closed source kernel over an open
one.  These are technical people by the way ;-)

Rambling rant over

So to answer your question, No it isn't, it almost definately won't be,
but it will appear faster in the future ;-)

> 
> David.

sparkes
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