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From Hurd to seL4: How Stallman’s Microkernel Vision Stood the Test of Time
In the early 1990s, while the tech world was rallying behind monolithic kernels and Linux was beginning its march toward global domination, Richard Stallman made a contrarian bet. The GNU Project chose to build the GNU Hurd not as another Unix clone, but as something radically different: a collection of modular user-space servers running atop a microkernel foundation.
The reasoning was elegant in its simplicity. Why cram everything into kernel space where a single bug could crash the entire system? Why not isolate components, make them replaceable, and create a system that could evolve without fear? It was a philosophy built on three pillars: isolation, flexibility, and security.
But the 1990s were unforgiving. Mach’s inter-process communication crawled at a snail’s pace. Hardware couldn’t handle the overhead. Linux’s monolithic approach delivered raw performance that left microkernels in the dust. GNU Hurd became a footnote in computing history — a noble experiment that failed to launch.
Or so it seemed.