Hi, On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:35:48AM +0200, Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> Is it possible to run only *parts* of the Hurd on separate computers, > that is, make the Hurd a kind of a network operating system. It most > probably sounds crazy, but I know that only a microkernel OS can do > something like that, so the Hurd may be appropriate :-) This is actually not far off: In fact distributed systems were a (or even *the*?) major research focus of Mach -- Mach provides network-transparent RPC for that purpose. I don't know of anyone ever having tried running Hurd in a distributed fashion; but I guess it wouldn't be too hard to make it work. However, I consider it more of a burden than a feature. In my understanding, the network transparency is responsible for a considerable part of the complexity (slowness) of Mach's IPC mechanism. It also forces the network drivers to be in the kernel. And it's not terribly useful either: Today even the smallest machines have enough resources that there is no motivation to avoid having a complete instance of the operating system on each node. Distributed systems are of course still interesting at the application level; but the general consensus nowadays seems to be that such stuff is better implemented at a higher level than IPC primitives -- definitely not inside a microkernel at least... -antrik-
