What even is a 20% delta in performance? Like a five year old difference in hardware design.
If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.
If anything, Mach style IPC has gotten worse because of the greater overhead if kernel/user transitions. Spectre really did a number on context switching overhead.
I'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ).
I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
I could see just powering through because modern hardware is fast enough to do so being an option.
Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.
Hurd is like 36 years old at this point. More like adding 20% to a 10 second operation, compared to adding 20% to a 10ms operation.
What even is a 20% delta in performance? Like a five year old difference in hardware design.
If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.
If anything, Mach style IPC has gotten worse because of the greater overhead if kernel/user transitions. Spectre really did a number on context switching overhead.
People lost their shit when Spectre mitigations added 20% overhead to kernel calls though. Why wouldn't they do the same for microkernel overhead?
If people really cared about performance, we'd be doing something other than the bloated way we have been doing things.
https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo
I'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ).
I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
I mean, every major arch has crypto specific acceleration instructions.