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The Hurd Gets Support For Large Filesystems

Posted by timothy on from the lumbering-onward-discontentedly dept.

latroM writes "Finally, after many years of waiting, the Hurd has got support for partitions larger than 2GB. The patch is told to be very stable and its development was started about a year and a half ago. Michael Bank writes: 'I hacked the Debian package so far that I make it build a statically compiled ext2fs with Ogi's patch (20041029) for partitions > 2GB. For now, I decided to just copy libpager, libdiskfs and ext2fs to libpager-ogi, libdiskfs-ogi and ext2fs-ogi, apply his patch and dump the result as a new patch. Another patch modifies the Makefiles accordingly.' I did some basic tests with those packages and they work fine for me so far. Any comments on how they work for people and how to possibly improve the packaging and integration of the patch are very welcome."

14 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Take that, Microsoft! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    The mighty HURD has >2 GB filesystem support, and Longhorn still isn't out! Who's laughing now? I ask: Who is laughing now?

  2. Hurd development by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    According to the Hurd's "What's New" page, nothing new has happened since August 2003.

    Doesn't exactly look as if development is proceeding at a roaring pace.

    1. Re:Hurd development by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I posted the same thing the last time a HURD story came up. Turns out they have trouble maintaining websites and the links to the mailing lists are outdated, there are new mailing lists lurking somewhere. At the moment, there isn't much visible progress as they are busy porting from one microkernel to another.

    2. Re:Hurd development by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Turns out they have trouble maintaining websites...

      And they're trying to code a kernel?

  3. "Finally, after many years of waiting" by pb · · Score: 2, Funny

    You've been waiting for The HURD? Oh, whoops, I've been using Linux. It's quite nice, I hear RMS uses it to host webpages and stuff. Perhaps you should try it!

    --
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
  4. Good Job! Now, what's next... by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Funny

    Large filesystem support...check

    Let's see what we still need...

    Out of memory
    Segmentation fault

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  5. Evolution of HURD by mhesseltine · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While Linux, Windows, etc. have had 2Gb filesystems for a long time, it is nice that HURD supports larger files now.

    I'll probably never use it, but I respect the HURD crew for continuing to stay committed to their project, despite HURD being so far behind other kernels.

    --
    Overrated / Underrated : Moderation :: Anonymous Coward : Posting
    1. Re:Evolution of HURD by Corporal+Punishment · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree, there are so many open source projects that fall a little behind of other similar projects and *poof*, it gets abandonded. Just look at how many dead projects there are on Sourceforge.

  6. Future by zemoo · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can't believe no one's said this yet:

    Large filesystems are great ... but will it run Duke Nukem Forever?

  7. Next Up... by DesScorp · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...they're replacing punch cards with a monitor and keyboard. Oooohhhh! An I hear they've got....shhhh...Floppy Drive support on the way!

    They've GOT to fix that 640K thing though...like, gag me with a spoon...

    --
    Life is hard, and the world is cruel
  8. Re:how can one most easily check out the HURD? by Otter · · Score: 2, Informative

    Debian has a HURD distribution. The installation doesn't sound too bad if you have an existing Linux (or whatever) system and an adequate free partition, and are already using grub. I haven't been insane enough to try it, though.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  9. Re:how can one most easily check out the HURD? by albalbo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can get Debian GNU/Hurd, this is the easiest way to install a GNU system. It looks much like Debian GNU/Linux though - in fact, very similar. The GNUishness seems to affect more than the Linuxness ;)

    In terms of differences - Hurd has very different models of doing things. For example, non-root users can effectively mount filesystems if they have all the permissions needed. There are these things called "translators" which is a bit like FUSE or the other user-space filesystem things you get - essentially, generating a filesystem via a program, so you could mount anything you can script really.

    There are lots of other interesting differences. Hurd isn't terribly similar to Linux, and does allow you to do some rather cool things.

    --
    "Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
  10. Actually, we went down a slightly different road by mbanck · · Score: 3, Informative
    Contrary to what I wrote in that post to debian-hurd which got cited for this article, we decided to not do all this patching to have two static ext2fs translators (one supporting big stores larger than 2GB, the default one not) next to each other.

    Instead, after some more testing, we decided to fully apply Ognyan Kulev's patch so that every translated ext2 file system will use it. I committed the code to the Debian Hurd package svn repository yesterday and we will probably upload it by the end of this week.

    Michael

  11. Oh, and my last name is 'Banck' not 'Bank' by mbanck · · Score: 2, Informative
    Michael Bank writes:

    I am called Michael Banck, actually.

    but what else do you expect? =)

    Michael