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hackerbrother

It’s always heralded as a great CS debate, but Tanenbaum’s position seems so obviously silly to me.

Tanenbaum: Microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels.

Torvalds: I agree— so go ahead and write a Production microkernel…

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Gnu Hurd has been under development since 1990.

14 years ago (2011) this thread happened on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/edl9t/so_whats_the_d...

Meanwhile in 1994 I knew people with working linux systems.

Hurd failed not because of microkernel design, in 1994 multiple companies were shipping systems based on Mach kernel quite succesfully.

According to some people I've met who claimed to witness things (old AI Lab peeps) the failure started with initial project management and when Linux offered alternative GPLed kernel to use, that was enough to bring the effort even more to halt.

Most famously these days, Mac OS (formerly known as Mac OS X, to distinguish it from all of the earlier ones) is built on top of Darwin/XNU, which descends from Mach.

As always don't mix technical issues with human factors.

> so go ahead and write a Production microkernel

He has though. Tanenbaum's created the most popular production OS in the world, and it's microkernel based: https://www.networkworld.com/article/964650/minix-the-most-p...

Is the article really right though? I imagine that much more stuff runs some linux on any machine than there are running intel processors. Even if it was true in the past, it likely has shifted in linux favor even more

That doesn’t make the article not right for the time it was published.

https://blog.minix3.org/tag/news/

Last post is from 2016. Any news on MINIX front?

AST retired. Nobody's picked up the banner. Damned shame.

https://www.osnews.com/story/136174/minix-is-dead/

Intel had profited tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from Minix 3. Minix replaced ThreadX (also used as the Raspberry Pi firmware) running on ARC RISC cores. Intel had to pay for both.

If Intel reinvested 0.01% of what it saved by taking Minix for free, Minix 3 would be a well-funded community project that could be making real progress.

It already runs much of the NetBSD userland. It needs stable working SMP and multithreading to compete with NetBSD itself. (Setting aside the portability.)

But Intel doesn't need that. And it doesn't need to pay. So it doesn't.

I wish MINIX3 would pick up, it does look promising, especially looking at its features, the reincarnation and whatnot.

https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:featur...

Well yes.

I wish Intel set up a community foundation and funded it with 0.01% of what Minix 3 saved it.

People often forget the best way to win a tech debate is to actually do it. Once multiple developers criticized that my small program is slow due to misuse of language features. Then I said: fine, give me a faster implementation. No one replied.

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