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GNU/Hurd Delayed To Fix Disk Size, Serial I/O Limitations
gregger writes "This Infoworld article indicates that the GNU/Hurd is still waiting to stampede. Evidently they have to switch from the GNU Mach implementation they're using now to OSKit's Mach which will help them support faster serial I/O and larger hard discs. Currently GNU/Hurd will only support somewhere between 1 to 2 GB partitions."
Is harder than most people seem to think it is.
That being said, I think the Hurd is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Who cares? And why? The FreeBSD kernel does everything Hurd purports to want to be able to do, and is more mature, stable, and feature-complete. The same could probably be said of the Linux kernel.
Does that mean the Hurd guys should stop what they're doing? Of course not. Writing operating systems is fun.
It does, however, probably mean that the stuff they're doing isn't really news.
Kudos to RMS for fighting the good fight, but he's already contributed significantly to Linux. I really don't think it'll go farther than that.
This sig no verb.
I'd assume that they're working on the HURD because they think that it's interesting, fun, and/or a good learning experience. Not all Free Software development has to take place with the goal of taking over the world. A lot of it, as ESR points out, is done to satisfy the interests of the individual authors. That's why there are a million projects on Freshmeat that are essentially clones of the same basic project- mp3 player frontends, database systems to catalog CD collections, etc. Individual programmers write them for their own personal reasons and then provide them for anyone else who wants a copy.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The biggest issue is that Stallman is an idealist. Torvalds just wanted a working Unix-line OS.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
*shrug* You and I may like speed... but for the average user microkernels offer more advantages.
You and I are running servers and gaming systems; we want pure performance, and don't mind rebooting a couple of times or recompiling a kernel to change hardware or upgrade drivers. In contrast, my mom has trouble right-clicking My Computer and choosing Properties to get a driver list. For her, a layered driver system that can dynamically load and unload drivers as needed and layer itself against instability is a MAJOR plus, even if it's not for me.
Just because I favor speed over robustness doesn't mean either is intrinsically better - it just means my needs run that way. And, being a programmer, chances are that my needs represent a very tiny fraction of the computer users out there.
I wish that fewer people would be so damned hardline pragmatic. It's worth putting time into stuff that could be cool and to try to do things in ways that are nice. Maybe it'll fail, but it's worth the attempt, even if it only serves as an example of what doesn't work.
The best reason for HURD: "Because they want it that way."
No one should have to justify what they want to build to you or anyone. Free software is not about the GPL. It's about freedoms. If these people want to build the most paradigmatically pure kernel ever conceived of, I think that's great.
If they want to turn an architecturally useful chunk of marble into a useless statue of some kid named David. That's great too.
When I enter a bunch of keywords into freshmeat and pick over the results, I occasionally ask myself, "What was this guy thinking?" Others with that same list ask that same question, but about different projects. It's the fact that we are free to combine conceptual purity, modifiability, stability, speed, and dozens of other engineering trade-offs in exactly the manner that we think is "right" that makes picking through Freshmeat like picking through a box of Dark Chocolates.
Oddly, the same rule applies. If you don't like a particular chocolate, don't eat it; don't whine about it; just pick a different one
I wish Mr. Stallman the fewest alpha particles and the best of luck in his noble pursuit.
Bang on the money.
If I might add to what you've pointed out, RMS has explained that the motivation for continuing development of the Hurd is that it has the potential to be something much more powerful.
Which leads to what really bothers me about the Slashdot crowd's reaction to the Hurd. Lot's of people I know criticize Free/Open Source Software just rips stuff off, and doesn't innovate. Well, the Hurd is one of the most innovative Free Software projects around. These guys were talking about buiding a multi-server OS back at the beginning of the 90s.
Come on, once the Hurd is finished, GNU/Hurd will be years ahead of GNU/Linux, Windows NT, or Mac OSX. The only other OS I know of that's as theoretically-advanced as GNU/Hurd is QNX another multi-server.
This is cool stuff. Unfortunately, it seems that most people just want to complain, "Oh, does it have the drivers for XXXXX? No. Then it's useless." Grow up - the value of an operating system isn't defined by what hardware it runs on. That's much easier to change than the fundamental architecture of the system.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
Does anyone here know why they let the partition size issue languish for so long?
The partition size is limited because the Hurd maps the entire disk partition into main memory, and the 32-bit architecture of current Intel processors limits the size of a virtual address space to 2^32 bytes, hence the limitation. Changing the Hurd to do things differently isn't exactly a one-weekend patch.
On another note, once we go the 64-bit processors, we'll see a much larger virtual address space (double it's current size 32 times), and hence a much higher cap on the partition size (assuming no fix).
On another note, does anyone know how HURD benchmarks against linux?
This really isn't the right question to ask: remember that the Hurd is at version 0.2, and that "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." No new Free/Open Source kernel is going to ship and be immediately as fast and full-featured as Linux... things just don't work that way.
What's important is that the Hurd represents new OS technology... and that's more important that any current lack of performance or drivers.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
People can use GNU/Linux. You don't use the kernel (as an end-user), you use your applications.
I think we've got a best-of-both worlds situation here: in the meantime, we've got a very good monolithic kernel (Linux), and we've got a nice multi-server in the works (Hurd), for when the time comes when monolithic kernels just can't cut it anymore.
And regarding your statement, "It doesn't matter if you are theorectially advanced.", that's a load of BS. If no one is innovating, technology stagnates. What we're seeing here is the price of innovation. And if Free/Open Source isn't willing to do this, then we'll deserve the criticism that we're just ripping off proprietary software.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
This isn't the right way to measure the "goodness" of a system. The Hurd has concepts that are actually innovative.
If you're going to say that the Hurd sucks because it doesn't support some piece of hardware or software, then *damn*, Linux really sucks... and it did even more so at version 0.2. Gee, what am I doing... where's a Windows box? Win 98 must obviously be superior to all these Free/Open Source systems, with all the hardware and software it supports.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
I think everyone here is being pretty unfair to Hurd and RMS's efforts. Hurd can easily do all kinds of stuff you'll never get Linux to be able to do, like allow unpriviliged users to mount filesystems in their home directories without causing problems for security, allowing ordinary users to hack the kernel without breaking security and so on.
All of this has been a major advancement in computer science, and they simply haven't needed things like large partitions that of course would be needed for widespread acceptance. I simply don't see it as a big deal that they've taken so long to add the features needed for an end-user, because they had to take a long time to write the architectural underpinnings that are miles beyond Linux.
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HURD is not the operating system choice of "hackers" or slashdotters. Hackers want to run computer applications (reliably and speedily). That is not what HURD is about. Its the utopian platform for computer science geeks; people who want to go beyond the current paradigm of UNIX, classic sequential computing, etc. . By abstracting the ukernel to a couple of critical operations (time slicing, memory allocation, and IPC), and moving every other operation to user mode, you have a tool that can be used to implement new concepts in computer operating systems.
Its not an alternative to Linux. Its an orange to Linux's apple. It will suck as an alternative to Linux. It will run slower than Linux (especially if they stick with Mach). It will not run more stablely than Linux (given its increased complexity). It may be a better platform for multiple CPU configurations, be we won't know that for sure until its ukernel design is complete, and an implementation of HURD actually proves it to be faster. Very few people will want to port useful packages to HURD; they'll go to Linux for reliability and performance. HURD's purpose is not a platform to run applications. Its a platform for computer science research.
That is the reason why I do not wish death on HURD and rejoice when there is good news for it. It does not really compete with Linux for mindshare. If it proves to be a superior platform for MP processing, only then will it have a mundane use.
I have massive contempt for its project management. Its currently looking like the OS that will never get released. And it does not deserve a serious look until it gets a quality ukernel, like L4 (which itself is unfinished). MACH will not cut it, or its UKS(?) version.
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