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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

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chris_wot·

They had a working version to test on? Surely such a mythical beast doesn't exist?

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Of Hurd? Debian has had an in-development version since 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_GNU/Hurd

There's also Arch Hurd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Hurd

Gentoo is also listed: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/running/distrib.html

It does, it is just that most people tend to ignore Hurd anyway.

Personally I want Hurd and Minix 3 to gain support, as I feel that micro-kernels are the way to improve operating system security.

The only successfully commercial attempts so far have been Symbian and QNX.

Symbian was a microkernel?

Symbian ran on EKA2[1], which was a micro-kernel, although since Symbian included device drivers it wasn't technically a true microkernel[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#Symbian_kernel

I was fairly sure that NT was originally going to be a microkernel, but it ended up being really slow, so they had to push everything into a more monolithic architecture.

My understanding that this was mainly about moving graphic drivers back into kernel space from user space (circa NT 4.0).

and now they tout it as a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel

NT derived from Mica, DEC's microkernel OS project for their research RISC architecture PRISM. When DEC cancelled Mica along with PRISM — flirting briefly with MIPS before finishing Alpha — project lead Dave Cutler and some of his team took it to Microsoft. (The eventual settlement had MS support NT on Alpha until DEC collapsed from mismanagement.)

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