/servers/socket/2 -- why only one inet socket?

[Clemmitt Sigler]

Hi,

I've learned from reading stuff that /servers/socket/2 <- inet is
"special."  I tried to find out why by reading the hurd and gnumach
source code from CVS, but I couldn't find any direct refs to
this.

It surely would be helpful to have more than one Internet socket
to use in the Hurd.  I'm willing to bet that OSkitMach and later
gerneration microkernels (L4/Hurd) address this, among other,
current limitations.

But a quick-and-dirty explaination of why the Hurd is limited to
one Internet socket would satisfy my curiosity, and that of some
others trolling here as well, I bet.  Is that just the way Mach
is designed?  I thought Mach was the basis of the microkernel
architecture of OSF/1... Digital Unix... Tru64Unix(???)

One other useful feature would be IP aliasing (that is, multiple
IP addresses assigned to one physical device/NIC).  Thanks for
any and all explainations, guys :^)

                                        C