From: wcn@cs.brown.edu (Wen-Chun Ni) Subject: Re: GNU Hurd (was Re: BSD Unix) Date: 21 Jul 1992 17:15:20 GMT
In article <1992Jul21.131526.8920@ncsu.edu> jlnance@eos.ncsu.edu (JAMES LEWIS NANCE) writes:
>
>In article <1992Jul21.112705.6276@cs.cornell.edu>, murthy@cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy) writes:
>|> free unix is perhaps 2 years away - in 2 years, linux will be stable.
>|> In two years, the GNU Hurd will be stable. And AT&T can
>
>I have been wondering this for some time but have refrained from asking it
>because it sounds like a flame, but it is not.
>
>GNU has been working on Hurd for as long as I have know about them. This has
>been at least 3 years, and I have seen nothing from them. Linus has been
>working on linux for about a year and a half, and has produced a very good
>operating system. Does anyone know what is taking GNU so long? Prehaps they
>have released beta versions that I am unaware of, or prehaps they do not
>want to release anything before they get it finished? Anyone know?
>
Two folds:
1) Until very recently, GNU had yet to get the permission from CMU for
the use of Mach source code. This is related to legal actions.
2) The BSD layer above Mach is not easy to write concerning about the
fact that the 386-related Mach 3.0 code is larger than Linux.
Wen-Chun Ni
P.S. I expect the Hurd system to be large, a little slow, yet very powerful.
I like Linux better even though it doesn't support from-scratch
thread scheduling like Mach 3.0.