GNU Mach & Hurd overview

[Mark J. Rosenbaum]

I was interested in the current state of affairs for the 
GNU microkernel. project so I went to hurd home page. I find 
the microkernel. concept very interesting for parallel computers made up 
of Systems On a Chip (SOCs), an area of interest to me for twenty years. 
I would agree with your assessment of reference manual as being sub 
optimal as a tutorial. Since it's probably not intended as such I wasn't 
sure how to make suggestions so I'll start with an email and we can go 
from there.

A faq would be a nice way to find out what people don't understand and 
would like to know. This format is easy to follow and often become self 
organizing after a short while.

A basic tutorial on OSes would be nice. A single graphic of the 
different lays from machine hardware to microkernel to services to user 
apps would do. It could also be compared with integrated kernels, 
machine hardware to kernel to apps. A brief discussion of the pros and 
cons and why the world has not seen the light yet would also be helpful.

It's been my experience, both as a developer and a development manager, 
that getting developers to document is painful but getting them to 
answer specific questions is less so. Clearly you don't want them to 
spend their time writing doc instead of writing code but a little doc is 
a wonderful thing.

Thanks

Mark