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Hurd: H2 CD Images
An anonymous submitter sends in: "The Debian GNU/Hurd team released a new Hurd CD Image. Snapshot images are produced at a four to eight week interval and the H2 images are the tenth of the series. The Hurd has grown from one CD image in August 2000 (A1) to four images in December 2001 (H2). These images are snapshots of a developing operating system, so suitable precautions must be taken when making an installation. Similar to other architectures, most important programs reside on CD 1, while the other ones contain less important packages. For the moment, Hurd doesn't support card sound and partition size is still limited to 1 GB. Hurd use the Debian packaging system (dpkg and apt as for Debian linux) , so it is simple to install and update packages."
yay for hurd! Now we have the choice between 20 window managers, 10 editors, and two kernels!
The HURD is completely different from Linux - people will want to use it for the new features it brings. It's as different from Linux as from BSD as well - Linux & BSD are a lot closer than either of them are to the HURD.
Besides, if it looks and acts (for the most part) like your Debian GNU/Linux system, the entry bar is very low and people are more likely to try it.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Forget about GNU for a second - what are the technical reasons why anyone would want to use Hurd?
Microkernels attempt to give you a much more "UNIX-like" way of making a kernel: a lot of independent little "servers" that talk to each other and are somewhat isolated from each other. A bug in one kernel module will often not crash the whole system, and there is much less coupling between kernel components. Microkernels are not the most efficient way of achieving that kind of modularity, since the memory protection mechanisms they use are more costly than relying on compiler/language support together with dynamic loading, but given that people are going to continue to write lots of C code for the kernel, a microkernel may be the best compromise for achieving a modular, extensible kernel in the real world.
Well, it's good to see that both the Hurd and the Darwin projects are coming along. I'll certainly give this a try. Its hard for any new kernel architecture to replace something as mature, functional, and widely-used as Linux. But if something like the Hurd turns out to be significantly easier to extend and hack, it may well catch up quickly. Another path to acceptance is that people find that, despite having fewer drivers and less functionality, the functionality that something like the Hurd offers may be easier to configure and deliver to end users in prepackaged form (i.e., without "make menuconfig" and lots of obscure decisions).
I don't now anything about Hurd but one reason could be that some people (including myself) do care more about the underlying philosophy than if something "just works".
I think that KISS is no longer a part of the de facto Unix world. When you have hundreds of different ways of keeping things simple that have hundreds of simple kludges and workarounds to keep simply working together, the accumulated legacy cruft is, simply, no longer simple. It's a wonderful example of how incredible complex systems can emerge from the very simple behaviours of a few agents. Unfortunately, that makes it a royal pain in the ass sometimes.
I installed it on my system on its dedicated spare disk, boot it, run it and update the release from time to time.
It's not great as for device support but getting there. Drivers have always and will always be a problem for ANY OS (look at MacOS X and *BSD for living examples.) There are other features in the OS itself that make it forth a try.
If you guys are curious about it, you should definitely give it a try. Some compatibility layer is also provide for Linux drivers and apps. This needs work but what doesn't really.
The good thing is the upper layers which will provide POSIX compatibility for Unix developers to port their work. Pretty straightforward. The main reason why the distro has grown so largely in a small amount of time.
I read false assumptions and mistaken comments on this list about what is HURD. It's a kernel like Linux, and it's based on a microkernel architecture. Mach 4.0 happens to be this micro kernel but the architecture is not locked down so this can evolve if needs to be.
I read also people asking why does HURD exist at all. The answer is pretty simple: Why not? In the ten years it has existed, it should have died many times but it's still here. It's not a commercial OS like BeOS, some it doesn't need to generate streams of revenues to survive. It's just a bunch of code with ideas in it that are still pretty amazing today for it to still occupy developers to put efforts in it.
After all, we are living in a society that should encourage diversity and growth of new ideas (the US haven't being built with pioneers.) So, I am getting sick and tired of the moronic way of thinking in black & white (binary): Only two alternatives (Linux vs. Windoz) and no space for the others . And why is that? Why not letting people who enjoy using BSD and developing with HURD just do it without being hassled by the 2 main opponents?
Feeling grumpy because of the rain today.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
It's best to avoid processor-specific functionality
in large architectural decisions if you want to be
portable. Besides, it's nicer for modern systems
to have components that are layered better than
a cake, so that if I have two very important parts,
I know that they can't crash each other
accidentaly.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It probably wasn't this far away... until most of the potential HURD hackers were working on Linux instead.
It's just as well, though--there was more urgent need for a Free system (BSD wasn't yet) that's readily hackable than for one with an elegant but expensive design.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
what about something like the x86 segmentation mechanism?
It's always a trade-off between security/stability and speed. x86 has these cool segmentation features, but no one uses them because they are slow. The more levels of execution you have, the more time you spend switching between levels. The more bulletproof error checking you add, the more time the CPU spends checking for errors.
And as someone already noted, for non-x86 architectures you won't even have segment support in the hardware, so it will be slower still there.
The way most *NIX operating systems protect themselves is to rely on the memory manager hardware. If a process tries to touch something it shouldn't, the OS can get a page fault and trap the error.
I will be interested to see if HURD works out as they hoped: in principle, it ought to be really secure and really crash-proof. But the reality seems to be that it is taking years to get off the ground; perhaps some HURD fan can explain why.
Yeh Hurd is great.. unless you want sound or partitions large enough to actually install anything.. Even ms-dos could handle sound and greater than 1 gig partitions..
I think I'll stick with debian/linux and wait for Hurd to get a little bit more mature