[Microkernel-devroom] [TALK-PROPOSAL] The GNU/Hurd

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Here is a talk proposal for the microkernel devroom:

Title: The GNU/Hurd architecture, nifty features, and latest news
Full name: Samuel Thibault
Duration: 45min

Short abstract:
GNU/Hurd aims at being a general-purpose Operating System with a strong emphasis
on flexibility and freedom for the user, and thus based on a design made
of a micro-kernel surrounded by a hird of userland servers. It has however
a long-term vaporware reputation; development has indeed been relatively
dormant for some time, but recent regain of interest has brought interesting
improvements and stabilization, to the point that there will be a non-official
release of the GNU/Hurd variant of Debian Wheezy, with about 75% of the Debian
packages, including classical graphical desktop application (gnome, gnumeric,
firefox, ...)

This talk will present to GNU/Hurd in general and its "translator" mechanism
which replaces the traditional notion of filesystem by userland processes, so
as to provide strong flexibility to users and administrators, and we will demo
it live. The subhurd/neighborhurd mechanism, a very natural way to provide
virtualization container support on GNU/Hurd, will also be presented.  We will
also present recent developments, notably in terms of DDE device drivers run as
userland processes, and discuss about maintenance of DDE.

Cheers,
Samuel