On: Porting LLVM, clang et al. to GNU/Hurd

[pjmlp]

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.

[TheBoff → pjmlp]

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.

[seanmcdirmid → TheBoff]

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

[kps → TheBoff]

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.)

[irfn → TheBoff]

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

[tomjen3 → pjmlp]

Symbian was a microkernel?

[Mithrandir → tomjen3]

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