We have missed "celebrating" a milestone during the pandemic.

[Bob Proulx]

Brian Sturgill wrote:
> In May, Gnu Hurd celebrated its 30th pre-birthday.
> It is currently version 0.9 (i.e. still not released). The most recent beta
> was in 2018.

Cool!  We can all sing it Happy Birthday.  For real now that the song
has been declared out of copyright and now in the public domain. :-)

> From the GNU Hurd Website:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/what_is_the_gnu_hurd.html
> 
> "The Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for UNIX, a popular operating
> system kernel."

It's an odd kernel though.  And I think that hurt GNU by choosing to
go that direction.  Because it just never got moving.

> This led me to wonder if they had failed to ship before the "evil"
> commercial UNIX went extinct?
> Well it turns out there is one (and very likely only one) shipping version
> of commercial Unix,
> AIX, IBM's Unix variant, which shipped it's version 7.3 -- 18 days ago!

If you are not part of the problem then there is good money to be made
supporting it long term!

AIX was a basis for a lot of embedded products such as Netapp NAS
boxes.  I think they now have products based on GNU/Linux too.  But I
am pretty sure the big iron Netapp boxes are still using IBM AIX.
Makes me wonder how many other embedded uses exist.

My opinion using AIX was that it was a solid kernel but a less than
pleasant interactive user experience.  And at the time that was as
compared to HP-UX which I had been using extensively.

AIX also came with JFS which is a reasonable alternative to SGI's XFS
file system.  Probably a good combination with a large NAS server.

> Notably the 7.3 kernel can be replaced _LIVE_. I.E. a kernel change can
> occur on a running system without rebooting.

Downtime?  What downtime? :-)

> No doubt this will force a complete redesign of the Hurd kernel
> [redesign #1,323,458, though I might have missed a few :-)] in order
> to be able to compete with AIX.

I had often heard of HURD being described as technology of the
future.  Always has been and perhaps always will be.

Canonical supports some live Linux kernel updating as well.  As I
recall it is a paid subscription service.  But it does seem possible
to update the Linux kernel in place while running too.

Bob