Phoronix reports that version 0.6 of GNU Hurd has been released. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it's still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn't offer any compelling new features.
GNU Hurd 0.6 has "numerous cleanups and stylistic fixes" to the code-base, the message dispatching code in Hurd servers is now better, there's support for protected payloads of GNU March 1.5+, libz/libz2 are used as the decompressors to replace gz/bz2, the native fakeroot has improved, the performance of the integer hashing library has improved, and the init server has been split into the start-up server and a SysVinit-style program. The procfs and random translators were also merged.
More details on the new GNU Hurd release can be found via the 0.6 release announcement issued by Thomas Schwinge.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:32AM
Wrong. XNU is a mix of micro and monolithic. Mach 3.0 is IN it, so it is ignorant to say it has nothing to do with "the original Mach microkernel".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @12:40PM
The NeXT era was 25 years ago! There has been a huge amount of code change since then. Just because the term "mach" is still used in some kernel-level function names it doesn't mean that much of the original Mach code is still present.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:36PM
XNU in OS X is very much in the same form as XNU in NeXTSTEP. Both use Mach plus BSD kernel (and userland). The Mach part is upgraded from 2.5 to 3.0, and I/O Kit replaces Driver Kit.
In XNU, Mach code is used for:
thread and process preemption
protected memory
virtual memory management
inter-process communication
interrupt management
real-time support
kernel debugging support
console I/O
Those are pretty critical and far-reaching functions. So they chose not to route syscalls through Mach, and use the microkernel "server" model. That does not mean that Mach is not in there, and doing a lot of the things it was designed to do.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:56PM
sudo mod me up