Comment by temac

Well in the end we are using any X rather than Y tech because of manpower, regardless of pretty much any other characteristics.

So let's put manpower kind of aside for the bulk of the dev (where thousands of man-years are needed for any big project) and look at what could actually be achieved with the very small amount of manpower bootstrapping those projects. At this point you understand that the manpower thing is only a convenient narrative, while the reality is that even at the early time, Linux based systems worked really better than Hurd based systems.

Because general purpose micro-kernels based systems are hard, and especially those with a design as ambitious as the Hurd. (When you start to want to strongly isolate FS from VM code, it even stops being just hard and starts to be really HARD.)

And this was even worse at the time for perf reasons (but perf reasons are still applicable even today, given the impact on mobile and datacenter workloads)

However, yes, I'm in favor of more isolation today, because for a shitload ton of drivers it literally won't make any difference whether or not you take 1us vs 50us if you need to execute once every few seconds. So it is retarded to the highest level to run in kernel space if you don't actually need it. Sadly, Linux is way behind on that subject today.

That being said, and back to the original subject, a microkernel or at least a less monolithic one won't really get us in the less shared-libraries direction if it just re-implements the same perimeter of features of a monolithic ones, nor in the huge pages everywhere direction...