Re: Why GNU Mach is so different?

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Farid Hajji <farid.hajji@ob.kamp.net> writes:

> > technical features you need, there is, for example, the requirement to have
> > a network-wide unique process id for a task.  Thomas calls such a network
> > of Hurd systems a "collective".  I guess if you want to do distributed
> > systems in a Hurdish way, collectives are the way to go.  The concept exists
> > only in Thomas head, though, so you will have to nag him a bit to tell us
> > about his ideas.

> Network-wide unique identifiers like task-IDs, ports, etc... are a nice
> thing to have. One idea may be to organize all nodes of a collective
> in a distributed kind of (hurdisch) filesystem. IDs would then be
> simple paths and could be located with some kind of distributed
> lookup() functionality:

It was always my plan to have a single IP address for a collective.  
(The collective might use IP for communication between its component
systems, but those addresses would be entirely internal.)