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Are You Using the GNU/Hurd Kernel?
carter asks: "I remember this article from a year back about the brave soul who got a web server running on the GNU Hurd. Due to the now-famous /. effect, I never got a chance to see it running, and now the server appears to be down for good. One year ago is like ancient history in hacker-time, so it makes me wonder: has anyone else had luck getting a web server going on the Hurd? Is anyone using the Hurd for anything resembling production use yet? Also, is the Hurd project closing in on a stable release? To look at the Hurd's seemingly ever-static home page, one would think that no major developments have happened since 1999, although I'm sure this is not the case." For those of you who are actually running it, what are your experiences of the system? Are there any any pitfalls in installation and operation that you can share for those brave folks who are planning on making the plunge in the near future?
Aye, there was some discussion not too long ago about replacing the Mach architecture with L4. Some guy said he was going to do some thesis work involving the Hurd, and wanted to know what he could do that would be useful, and this was one of the first suggestions that came up.
Many of the debian-hurd folk were pretty excited about this possibility, as L4 is smaller and faster than Mach, is already in a working state, and is actively being worked on by its own cadre of developers.
(Man. To think-- not so many years ago, the vision for the GNU desktop system was GNUstep running on Hurd. I hope it'll still come to pass...)
iSKUNK!
Last I saw RMS he had Hurd in use on his laptop. I watched him drop into GDB when his Emacs died on him, and he hacked on it and then went back to writing Emacs documentation. It seemed pretty workable, but he was only using it in console mode. He was using a Happy Hacker keyboard, too, which I can't say was an endorsement but he seemed pleased with it.
This is before his laptop had the horrible screen damage that occured while he was in Brazil. That particular laptop is out of commission now, I think, after his modifying it to display on the unbroken half of the LCD screen, and then dying completely when he tripped over the power cord and knocked it off the table, cracking the other half of the display. The Brazilian Linux people bought him a new one, IIRC, and I think he paid them back later (but I'm not sure).
So, the Hurd seems to be living through his daily abuse. It must be functional, at least for that.
The Hurd is still under development and many features are brok^H^H^H^Himproving.
johno
872835240
I have to agree with some more FSF-cynic people here that the HURD indeed does resemble any other "My Own Featureful Kernel" kind of project, and if this one wasn't supported by the most influential Free Software Foundation, it would have been bleeding to death years ago. I mean, the historical mails from Linux Torvalds, wherein he announces the Linux kernel, are already cynical about the release date of the HURD (first he says "within a few months or so", in later mails he starts with "end of this year, age, millenium"-like suggestions). That reminds me a little bit of Paul stating in the Bible that "the End of the World is Nigh" -- words which are 2000 years old now. If it ("it" being the End of the World, or the HURD, or even both at once - whee :-) wasn't anywhere near "Nigh" way back then, then why should we expect it now?
Then again, one never knows what comes of a Free project. It may lay slumbering for years, then maybe development is suddenly picked up by an interested group o' people (like Debian).
Oh, and I'm interested, too. I recently tried it. After a night of downloading and installation (which is a smooth, automated process that only requires you to run a few scripts and mount a device as /gnu) that went quite OK, I rebooted with a GRUBbed floppy and found that the kernel hung. Shoot. After some discussion on the mailing list, they found that it was probably my ISA ne2000 card that hung the system.
(At this point, a cynic would say two things: first: "an ne2000 card is about the first thing one would have supported", and second: "one of the advantages of a microkernel should be that its modular design would allow for the system not to hang when one driver fails", right? I wasn't interested in being cynical, I never really am with Free Software. If it's crap, don't complain -- just don't use it, or make it better. You got it for free, and, unlike promotional material, the givers don't want anything from you in return.)
The folks from the HURD came up with a few solutions. Some of them involved fooling around in the sources and stuff and didn't seem proven solutions. Another option was to plug the ISA card out. While I'm not very fond of fooling around with hardware, I decided to do the last thing.
There went the HURD, passing the network card detection part as if it were a simple bend in the road, but then it suddenly crashed into a problem as if it were a trailer that was parked just around that bend. This time I got a real kernel error, not just a message-less halt. The idea behind this crash was that the HURD found way too little main memory on my system.
So I posted a new message to hurd-help, stating "problem solved, long live the problem", but this one didn't seem to get very much response. (The other message, AFAIK, resulted in some modifications in the network card detection stuff, but as you might know, it's very hard to autodetect an ISA ne2000 card, so I don't expect to see a really "smooth solution" unless, as with Linux, the "kickstart system" doesn't require all hardware to be detected and stuff.)
So for now, no, I haven't used HURD. Might check again later, but I don't want to disappoint myself for now, as I don't think that my current problems are now suddenly all solved. Even if the HURD will never come near stable, there's one thing that's good about it, and that's competition. Cool features and concepts can only inspire us all to make software better, just like Linux "inspired" Microsoft to do better, and GNOME and KDE inspire each other. And the HURD does have cool concepts (and probably features as well ;-).
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
That was *my* box you guys did in a year ago... =) I changed the address as quickly as I could to save my poor development system.
For an update, apache still compiles nicely on it, and recently many people got X running.
As to the Hurd web pages, I've taken over development on them and you can generally expect there to be updates to them starting this weekend. I'd appreciate any assistance people want to give. (web-hurd at gnu.org)
Another good place to go is http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
We cannot release GNU/Hurd-0.3 without all the above.
But the worst problem by far is lack of developers. Let's hope that this article will attract new people into the GNU/Hurd community.
Previous articles failed to do it though :-(