Re:GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
by 0cf8612b2e1e on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @04:45PM
(#49188762)
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.
Re:GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
by yjftsjthsd-h on Thursday August 06, 2026 @12:38AM
(#49192511)
> 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.
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.
Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.