First, my slug:
- refuses to recognise the USB NIC I have been using until the latest incidents (it either says 'not accepting address, error -71' or 'device descriptor read/64, error -71')
- sometimes reboots when I insert the USB NIC
- either doesn't boot at all or boots really slowly when the USB NIC is inserted
- (obviously) doesn't show the NIC in lsusb listing when is not recognised
Dear no-so-lazyweb, is there a way to install Debian on an ASUS WL-500G Premium router without loosing wireless ability? Or, is there a way to make use of my USB NIC with the ASUS router?
Second, Andrew S. Tanenbaum visited Romania and lectured Friday at the University „Politehnica” Bucharest.
He presented Minix3's architecture and the advantages it has over monolithic OSes. I attended the lecture (although I am not a student anymore) and found it quite nice and well prepared, but I had the feeling that sometimes he was trying to avoid or to bash topics that were not putting Minix into a good light or challenged its title of being the first open[0] OS based on a micro-kernel architecture[1]. In spite of that, I found him to be a really good speaker and I liked the overall presentation, although, I also expected some on the spot demos or at least some recordings.
The things that I remember:
- 2.4 millions subtle code alterations in drivers with only 80000 driver crashes (of course, no kernel crashes)
- simulation of network driver repeated crashes at different time intervals and how it affects performance - a 30% degradation at crashes that occur once every second and an insignificant degradation at crashes occurring at each 10 seconds
- every driver has a set of rights assigned to it; it was difficult for them to define this - this sounds a lot like SELinux issues
- messages have a fixed length
- there is no dynamic memory allocation within the kernel
- the kernel is 5000 lines of code (all drivers are in user space)
- really secure system
- there were performance comparisons with Minix2 and the hit was about 20%; still, is said that L4 has only an approximate 2-5% performance hit because of the micro-kernel architecture
- apparently the FreeBSD kernel has only 3 bugs /1000 lines of code
- Minix uses a BSD license
I was thinking, would it worth the effort to try to make a GNU/Hurd/Minix system (i.e. replace Mach with Minix's micro-kernel)? BTW, is Debian GNU/Hurd now based on L4 or does it still uses Mach?
Note: Some of my work colleagues suggested that the presentation was the same as one he made at linux.conf.au last year, but I can't confirm/infirm that since I didn't saw the recording.
I won't write about the "fog drive", but I'll just say it wasn't pleasant at all, and I felt I was in driving in The Twilight Zone for the whole Friday evening.
[0] he gave credit to QNX
[1] For instance, I tried to ask him twice if he felt that GNU Hurd was violating the micro-kernel paradigm or if he can compare it to Minix' architecture. I had the impression that both times he avoided to answer and started the usual Hurd bashing, "they have been developing it for 20+ years, but got nothing working", meanwhile "Minix is here". After the lecture/presentation somebody told me that AST shortly said that they "were similar, but different". I didn't catch that line.
[2] thanks to qemu-launcher it is trivial to create and manage multiple qemu virtual machines
2 comments:
Debian GNU/Hurd still uses GNU Mach. Vanilla L4 turned out to lack kernel support for secure IPC, and none of the research groups trying to implement that have dropped their code yet I think. Still, work to put the Hurd to another microkernel continues, albeit slowly, and it is unclear whether mainline will ever switch.
Michael
I've visited his lecture about Minix recently, in .cz. I suppose it was the same you've seen and I have similar impression - presentation was more about show than technical informations and he was reluctant to answer some question.
Overall, pleasant show, but my geek part was a little disappointed :)
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