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New GNU Hurd Kernel Released
Anonymous Coward writes "I don't know if there is much interest out there, but GNU Mach Kernel 1.3 was just released a couple days ago. (May 28)." Looking forward to that 2002 release...
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Its called the GNU/GNU Hurd, because its part of the GNU/System
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Support for the terminal speeds B57600 and B115200 has been added.
Now I can use my new 56k modem! Pretty soon, every ISP will be using this fast new speed of modem, it will be cool! Gopher's gonna FLY on this baby!
Okay just kidding, glad to see HURD is still alive. I remember first reading about it long ago and thinking, hey, finally a modern OS. But here I am still using a monolithic kernel after all these years, and it works just fine. Good luck to the HURD folks, maybe my kids will use it. :-)
Anyone willing to try out the Hurd can download some .ISO's at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/iso/hurd-H4/. They're based on Debian, and so apt-get and all that works in them.
As mentioned before, this version of Mach is about to be dropped in favor of OSKit-Mach. I don't know what the H4 CD's have (I haven't installed 'em yet) but the H3's didn't use OSKit-Mach. OSKit Mach has all the drivers that Linux 2.2 has, which is better than Mach 1.3, which iirc only has Linux 2.0's drivers.
In my brief experience with the HURD (you can only have so much fun without network card drivers) I liked it even more than Linux - using servers instead of using the kernel itself makes it more logical to, say, integrate an FTP directory into your filesystem (and indeed, this server has already been set up). settrans is lots of fun.
It's got X. It has pretty much everything you need - I could convert to the Hurd and barely lose productivity. What it's missing mostly are drivers (though OSKit should help with that, I haven't tried it).
Anyway, if you have a weekend to kill, it's a lot of fun.
This always makes me laugh... oh that Linus. Anyway, no karma whoring have 50 anyway.
Which is a completely idiotic idea, and which is only just another example
of how absolutely and stunningly _stupid_ Hurd is.
Later on...
Trust me. The people who came up with MAP_COPY were stupid. Really. It's
an idiotic concept, and it's not worth implementing.
And this all for what is a administration bug in the first place.
In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd
people.
All by Linus found here lkml
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
MACH is an old and flawed u-kernel implementation. Until HURD ports itself to a better one, HURD will always be slower than Linux and a more bug ridden OS. u-kernel OS implementations have proven to work with products like QNX, but HURD can only embarrass u-kernel advocates with its current foundation.
Its more annoying when advocates bitch and moan that "Linux is a 40 yr old design". So is about everything that is sucessful on the market. Do these guys really expects us to drop what works to what cannot work well in its current state? As is, HURD is an embarrassment to O/S purists. Its the "portable" O/S that can't even work well on ONE hardware architecture!
Its sad that HURD lacks interested, talented programmers, but its strategic stewardship is its downfall. Or the difference between a Torvalds and an RMS. I don't think HURD announcements deserve to be put on the front page of
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The slash crowd seems to be a bunch of "technical" guys who can't get beyond personalities.
Hey guys, written any good C compilers lately? Come up with any revolutionary social institutions, like the GPL?
On those two grounds alone, you would think that RMS would be revered at least as much as Linus Torvalds, but no... "RMS, he's that nasty guy with a beard who keeps talking about politics. Let's go get him."
IF YOU AREN'T INTERESTED IN THE HURD, THEN SHUT UP.
/. editors decided to carry the story. The comments are filled with jokes about how stupid RMS and the HURD are. I dearly wish there was a "strip all comments labeled "Funny" button.
Can slashdot posters quit talking out of their rear-ends for even one article?
A long-running project in the open source world just made an announcement. The
I'm very interested in how the HURD is progressing, and in TECHNICAL OPINIONS on the HURD. Where are the technical opinions among the comments? Damn few and far between. This is the sort of nonsense that makes slashdot look worse than USA Today (hell, slashdot doesn't even have color barcharts on the front page!).
At one time, I learned a lot about computers and socioeconomic factors surrounding computing by reading slashdot comments. Several years ago, comments included information from computer scientists, sysadmins, and knowledgable hobbyists. Eventually there was a problem where you couldn't find those comments in between the 50 copies of "First Post!". Moderation came, and I could usually find the good posts again.
The comments on this article, however, demonstrate just how stupid the slashdot population has become. My theory is that the huge popularity of slashdot in the US has attracted a readership which closely mirrors the average intelligence of the general US population -- you know, the same population that elected GW Bush for president (motto: "What we need is a clear policy in the Middle East"). The moderation system that once worked well is failing miserably because almost all moderators are as stupid as the posters.
As anyone can tell, I'm pretty pissed that a bunch of whiney losers in diapers, who couldn't spell "algorithm" if they had a copy of CLR on their desk, or explain why CISC was a natural choice for microprocessors in the 1960s, have drowned out any hope of interesting discussion on a technical topic. The comments attached to this article provide some sort of slashdot corrolary to the bikeshed axiom: Since a moron reading slashdot feels compelled to make authoritative posts on every article (to increase their karma?), they will post about the bikeshed color if they have nothing to say about the bikeshed. God help us when the discussion turns to nuclear power plants.
Beyond technical comments, why does everyone feel a need to deride RMS and the GNU project all the time? It seems natural to have some social discussion of RMS and the GNU project attached to any article about the HURD. I can understand why RMS is unpopular. I can understand why some people dislike RMS' campaign to use the name "GNU/Linux" when discussing operating systems which use the GNU foundation but replace the GNU kernel (I guess my feeling on this is clear). What I can't understand is why people put so damn much energy into making RMS a laughing stock.
At this point, it no longer matters what RMS does or says; the slashdot readership seems hell-bent on destroying RMS just because they heard that he was unpopular in some circles. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that Microsoft had a pool of RMS-trolls trying to change public opinion of RMS, GNU, and Free Software via slashdot comments.
I'd like to encourage everyone reading this to do the following:
1) Think for yourself
2) Listen careefully to what people say, in comments and otherwise
3) If you don't have anything useful to contribute, then keep your mouth closed.
4) Be careful with the "funny" moderation tag -- we all need humor, but there's more (or should be) to slashdot than (rightly or wrongly) smacking people down
If we follow those rules, then maybe we'll be able to learn stuff from slashdot comments again. For instance, comments on this article about a new HURD release might include:
1) discussions of microkernel history, strengths, and weaknesses,
2) which microkernels are still in use
3) how the Darwin kernel design differs from the HURD design
4) a reasonable, well-thought-out debate about whether the long term benefits of the HURD justify the current HURD effort in the Free Software community
5) how changes in hardware might affect the expected future value of the HURD, given the HURD's extremely slow development
6) alternatives to monolithic and microkernel designs in principle and practice (I'm not aware of any, but surely someone has something in-between, if not totally different)
7) whether the Free Software and Open Source communities should really be involved with basic software research, or lower its ambitions and simply copy existing, working software
Maybe this post can at least spawn an intelligent discussion of whether it violates the rules it proposes (it probably does, but I'm not going to fix it because I'm still seeing red).
-Paul Komarek
No, it's the bit he didn't do soon enough, because his focus was putting together a widely portable operating system, mainly focusing on tools, that could (and did and still does) run on a variety of kernels, most of which were (at the time), sadly, proprietary.
Another way to view it: from RMS' point of view circa 1989, a "free" kernel was a lot like a "free" device driver, only bigger and more complicated, in that it enabled use of free software on certain hardware (CPUs). Compare that to writing more free OS utilities, which would be portable to all hardware that could support GNU software (regardless of kernel), and you can see why he might have made the choices he did at the time.
Now, did Hurd, once he focused GNU resources on creating it, prove to be an overly ambitious ivory-tower-type project? IMO, yes. In the meantime, Linus and others scratched an itch by evolving (moreso than designing a la Hurd) a kernel for a specific CPU family, which meant that the resources GNU might have used for such a project were used for other, more portable or widely useful, GNU tools -- or, at least, that was a plausible likelihood.
How do I know all this?
Because, in 1988 or 1989, I volunteered my "talents" to RMS for GNU, and specifically asked him if he wanted me to take over the job of writing the OS kernel for GNU, something that was dead-center down my area of expertise. (I'd been doing OS kernel and related work since, oh, about 16 years of age, in a professional sense anyway; since earlier as an "amateur hacker".)
He declined the offer and asked me if I knew anything about Fortran. Since I'd recently learned some things about compilers, specifically Fortran compilers, I said yes, and the upshot was that I wrote GNU Fortran (g77).
RMS's main point at the time was that he believed he'd be able to get some existing portable kernel "freed" for use with GNU, so why throw sparse resources trying to create a free copy out of whole cloth?
Now, you can argue that he should have had me write the kernel instead, and, personally, I would have loved doing that, especially since I'd have been an actual end user of the product (compared to g77, which I don't use). I wouldn't have been nearly as successful at Torvalds when it came to project management though, as can be easily verified from studying g77's history. But my kernel wouldn't have been the ivory-tower-style Hurd, either, and I probably knew more about OS kernel design and implementation as of 1988 than did Linus as of 1991, if technical competency is an important issue. (Not so much a boast as a natural result of having been born so much earlier that I'd had about a two-decade head-start getting into kernel development.)
But, had I undertaken that task, what role might Linus and the others have played? Would they have written g77? I don't think so. They might have scratched some other itch, of course, but, in the end, I think the results are better the way they actually worked out than if I'd been the author of the GNU kernel.
As to your other claims: I agree with most of them, except you do seem to be unaware of the fact that, unlike with Apache, KDE, even BSD components, there is, today, no such thing as a GNU-free Linux kernel, given the kernel's (IMO overly-aggressive) dependency on GNU-specific extensions to the C language.
Linux developed, and remains, much more like a potted plant with GNU as its soil than like a mere partner that happens to use GNU.
Indeed, without that plant, few people would be interested in the "special" soil that is GNU. It's the plant that makes the whole thing worth having, to most people anyway. But GNU soil had been, and continues to be, widely and portably used without a shred of Linux code involved, whereas there is no Linux system without GNU.
(I use "Linux system" to mean a Linux kernel running an OS that provides the means to change the kernel code and recompile the kernel, since that's an important aspect of what makes Linux special. I assume the Linux kernel itself can boot up and run on a given CPU with no GNU code present, but it can't, or at least couldn't, be compiled in the first place without GNU C.)
And, in case anybody's wondering, if it's simply a "small matter of programming" (aka SMOP) to replace the GNU components with some other, thus "demonstrating" that GNU/Linux is really just Linux with a lot of other stuff including GNU, then, by all means, try it.
But, also for the record, there has been, to my knowledge, no shortage of technically competent people who have declared publically that they will write a replacement for GCC that isn't a) GPL-licensed (say, public domain instead) and b) considered a GNU project.
These "threats", as some might view them, go back to maybe 1992 or so -- well before the "GNU/Linux", or "lignux", debacle started by RMS -- yet, last I knew, nobody had actually converted their anger at RMS, the GPL, the GNU project, whatever, into actual code that provides a usable GNU-free Linux.
If and when somebody does write a useful replacement for GNU (for licensing and/or political reasons), that'll be all the more reason to distinguish their Linux variant from the current one, which I have already gotten into the habit of calling GNU/Linux partly in breathless anticipation of that long-awaited event!
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.