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[[!meta title="A Critique of the GNU Hurd Multi-server Operating System"]]

Neal Walfield and Marcus Brinkmann wrote a paper titled [*A Critique of
the GNU Hurd Multi-server Operating
System*](http://walfield.org/papers/200707-walfield-critique-of-the-GNU-Hurd.pdf).
This was published in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review in July 2007.  This
is sometimes referred to as *the critique*.

The paper provides a technical overview of the Hurd's
architecture and critiques some of the decisions made.


# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2014-02-06

    <bwright> Just read a paper on hurd.
    <bwright> Some interesting dot-dot and chroot issues were raised.
    <bwright> But this was written my guess is in about 2007.


## IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2014-02-08

    <antrik> bwright: both the dot-dot and chroot issues are fairly easy to
      solve... of course they do indicate some more fundamental things to keep
      in mind though. in fact, a few years ago we came up with a concept for
      making filesystem permission handling more robust... but nobody ever got
      to implementing it :-(
    <antrik> bwright: this paper, I guess you are referring to the "critique"?
      it was in fact written by the Hurd/L4 initiators. the observations made
      in this paper are right, but IMHO they got carried away on the
      conclusions -- most of the issues can be solved within the existing
      framework, if you think about the actual problems seriously
    <azeem> so they didn't think about it seriously?
    <antrik> azeem: not in the right mindset I'd say :-)
    <antrik> macrus actually said himself a while later that he probably
      could/should have implemented some of the ideas within the existing
      Hurd...