RE: The Perils of Pluggability

[Christopher Nelson]

> 
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 10:30:54AM -0600, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> > I suppose that you really must decide who your target audience is.  
> > Who are YOU aiming the Hurd at?
> 
> We aren't aiming at anyone in particular.  How the system 
> handles is policy, it's done in user space.  The GNU system 
> may have a target audience, the Hurd does not.

I wasn't aware there was a difference.  Perhaps the web page for the
Hurd should be updated from "The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's
replacement for the Unix kernel. The Hurd is a collection of servers
that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network
protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented
by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux)."  to something
that makes it clear that GNU system and the Hurd are two very different
projects.

In any case, you must be targeting SOMEONE.  Do you simply mean that the
Hurd is simply a set of servers that provide Unix-like behavior on top
of some other microkernel?  Are not the servers that implement Hurd
running in user space?  Do they not implement policy?  If not, what
value do you add, then, to L4? Or Mach?  I am now confused about what
the Hurd is supposed to be.

-={C}=-