This UNIX-like operating system is based on the work of Linus Torvalds and was inspired to some extent by Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix operating system. However, Torvalds also had in mind to overcome the limitations of Minix and abandon its microkernel concept for the sake of a modular kernel. Over the recent years, it has grown to a huge collaborative effort with thousands of developers.
The recent 2.4 Linux kernel has reached a level of stability and feature-richness that makes it an ideal platform for stability and cutting-edge testing as well. Linux uses a modular kernel design and heavily relies on GNU packages. Therefore, it is more accurate to refer to it as GNU/Linux.
GNU Hurd/Mach
The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's own UNIX kernel. According to their web page, "It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the UNIX kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux)."[2]
GNU Mach itself is the microkernel approach of the GNU system. In other words, a "microkernel provides only a limited functionality, just enough abstraction on top of the hardware to run the rest of the operating system in user space. The GNU Hurd servers and the GNU C library implement the POSIX-compatible base of the GNU system on top of the microkernel architecture provided by Mach."[3]
As time goes by, both the Hurd and GNU Mach probably will be ported to other hardware architectures. Currently it only runs on Intel 32-bit architectures. Nevertheless, its release cycles are much slower than those of Linux or BSD. It is more a proof-of-concept test bed for kernel specialists.
Other Commercial Unices
As mentioned previously, this book focuses on open-source UNIX operating systems, mainly because of transparency reasons and the availability of compilers and tools. I do not include NetBSD in this discussion because it is tailored for portability and does not offer anything remarkable beyond OpenBSD or FreeBSD.
The most dominant commercial operating systems right now are Sun Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, and IBM AIX. BSDI is Riverstone's commercial branch of BSD, facilitating Nexthop's GateD code as well as their own extensions. Almost all the big players have additional Linux-centric lines of business.
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