Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Begone Linux, GNU/Hurd Is The Real FOSS Kernel" video.

  1. ​​ @travisSimon365 hurd would not have won if history was different. i was around at the rime, and everyone was looking to work from bsd code, but the at&t vs berkley case had a chilling effect. the other possibility was that lots of people wanted to extend minix to be more useful, but andrew tenenbaum not only wanted to keep it simple as a teaching tool, but also refused to allow others to maintain a set of patches in the same way as was done for the ntsc mosaic server, wjh8ch was h9w we got apache, literally a patchy servrr due the sequence of patches on patches on patches which were maintained at the time. also remember that it was not until someone wanted to support a third architecture that the default changed from forking the codebase, then getting it to work on the new architecture and instead got the code needed for arch architecture to be brought into the mainline kernel, managed with configuration flags. so you had 386bsd being slowed down by at&t, minix expansi9n being actively opposed by tenenbaum, gnu's kernel being delayed by indecisiveness over how it should work, and multiple commercial unixes just being too expensive for students. then along comes linus, who like a lot of students wanted a unix workalike and happened to be going to university 8n a country with a funding model that did not exist anywhere else. he even used the monolithic design which he thought was worse, for speed. it was not that linus was cleverer, withmsomemgrand plan, just that everyone else could not stop shooting themselves in the foot. also your alternatives at the time were either a primitive version if dos, or cpm.
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  2. ​ @monad_tcp micro kernels are clearly a better design, apart from one small problem, the message passing model is painfully slow in practice. numerous tricks were tried to find ways to speed up micro kernels, unfortunately the same tricks also seem to work just as well with monolithic kernels, so soon after a speedup occurs in micro kernels, the same speedup is also applied to the monolithic kernels, meaning that the gains were quickly negated. almost all kernels now are modularised monolithic kernels.
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