[CLUE-Talk] gnu-hurd article

[Dave Price]

Full article here: http://kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=490


<snip>
In an article on Infoworld, Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project
and the Free Software Foundation, said that it would be impossible to
ship the first production release of the GNU project's operating system,
GNU/Hurd, by the end of this year, as was originally planned back in
March. [story]

These delays, according to Stallman, are mostly caused by two essential
features that are still missing from the Hurd kernel, namely, the lack
of hi-speed serial-line handling and a limit of about 1 to 2GB for
partition sizes.

The Hurd development teams plans to work around the first problem by
porting the Hurd from the GNU Mach microkernel to the OSKit Mach
implementation by the University of Utah; the second problem, though,
may be harder to cope with, since it touches upon the fundamental way
filesystem access is done in the Hurd, basically an mmap() of the
partition into kernel memory. But, as Stallman acknowledges, being able
to deal with larger partitions is a top priority - most users will not
be willing to repartition their disks to try out the Hurd, and given
today's harddisk sizes, avoiding a situation where a user is forced to
have dozens of even hundreds of partitions on his disk is an essential
task anyway.
</snip>
<rant>
The recent book: Free as in Freedom has sparked a renewed interest (for
me) in RMS's work and the hurd in particular ...

Now, how could someone with RMS's insight and 'genious' possibly
consider designing a kernel in this day and age with a 2gb partition
limit?  (Can't emacs edit files larger than that?)

I don't get it.  Thank god we have the linux kernel to use today!

</rant>

aloha,
dave