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.

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.

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 I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad.

I suggest that you look at genode/sculpt:)

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

The same people are perfectly fine with Electron crap all over the place, they don't really care about overhead.

Not true in a data center - 20% less work for same CPU is like 25% more cores needed for any applications where the scaling is driven by CPU utilization. That is $ - and people have made things so far from efficient many medium size companies have 100k cores to pay for.

I'm having a hard time believing that data centers are chomping at the bit to use the Hurd.

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.

Yes, it's worse because processors clocks are much faster than memory clocks.