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Basically Linux and then BSD took all the wind out of Hurds sails. A lot of that was timing, and also because those projects were much more attractive to big bu
by disordinary 10y ago
Basically Linux and then BSD took all the wind out of Hurds sails. A lot of that was timing, and also because those projects were much more attractive to big business who put a tremendous amount of development resources behind them.
As far as I know QNX is the only usable OS based on a microkernel.
- pjmlp 10y agoQuite a few embedded OSes are microkernels, L4 being one of them.
- disordinary 10y agoInterestingly L4 is being used to power the secure enclave on iOS devices so it's probably the most distributed microkernel.
- lokedhs 10y agoThere was a plan to move Hurd to use L3 instead of Mach, but apparently that project was cancelled.
- buserror 10y agoErrr... OSX and iOS are also MACH based. I'd call them 'usable' ? :-) Funny bit is, back in the 90's when Apple bough NeXT, they trashed the NeXT version of MACH and used the one that was in... mklinux instead! I bet very few people remember that bit. I remember because I had written the framebuffer console driver for mklinux back then, and seeing my init message when booting the earlier version of OSX (<=10.1 ish, perhaps a bit later too) So I had the privilege of printing kernel crash logs and panics on zillions of devices! I'm so proud! :-)
- disordinary 10y agoIt's classed as a hybrid though, not a pure microkernel. There's significant amounts of BSD in there. Also, thanks for the anecdote :)