• 2 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle





  • I finally watched the talk today and that wasn’t what I thought he meant. What I thought he was getting at was that the rust parts of the kernel interact with lots of other modules written by people who don’t know rust. When those C modules change their semantics in ways that break the rust code, they can’t go fix it because they don’t know rust. In fact, whenever they make a change, they don’t even know if they broke some rust module, because they don’t understand the rust code well enough. And this is something that everyone is going to have to live with for the foreseeable future, because you can’t force all those other kernel hackers to learn rust.








  • OctorinetoLinux@lemmy.mlLinus Torvalds and Richard Stallman
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    6 months ago

    I haven’t seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.

    IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don’t use it as intended. I think they’re mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.

    Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach’s performance issues, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.

    And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.


  • OctorinetoLinux@lemmy.mlLinus Torvalds and Richard Stallman
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    6 months ago

    Both, I think.

    It’s built in top of Mach, which has some architectural issues that aren’t fixable without a huge amount of work.

    And no one’s interested in doing that work because we already have Linux and Linux is fine.

    There have been a couple of pretty good post mortems over the years. I think one of them is on gnu.org somewhere.