First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD

wikinerd writes "The GNU Project was working on a new OS kernel called HURD from 1990, using the GNU Mach microkernel. However, when HURD-Mach was able to run a GUI and a browser, the developers decided to start from scratch and port the project to the high-performance L4 microkernel. As a result development was slowed by years, but now HURD developer Marcus Brinkmann made a historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4. He says: 'We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!'"

Comments

Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast is GNU/HURD compared to GNU/Linux? How about non-GNU/Linux?

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast is GNU/HURD compared to GNU/Linux? How about non-GNU/Linux?

Microkernel systems are always slightly slower because of the message passing overhead but they can be much more secure and stable because all of the device drivers are run in user space. Contrast it with systems such as Windows and Linux where drivers are in kernel space and it is impossible to have a stable or secure system with poor drivers, and in fact most of the problems with Windows and Linux crashing is caused by buggy drivers running in kernel space. When the drivers are just user processes like in HURD then a faulty driver can't crash the system and if it goes berserk it'll just get terminated just like a buggy browser or text editor without affecting the stability of th entire system.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Neat concept, but what if your graphics driver goes out?? Will it respawn automagically? Whaty if the hard drive controller's driver dies? Sometimes a neat concept ends up not being very practical. I would rather have the OS die if the hard drive controller's driver kicks off as there's less of a probablility of hard drive corruption. If the driver code for the hard drive dies and the kernel keeps running, would you not have lost alot data?

Re:Benchmarks?

[meburke]

I may be out of date, but wasn't this Tannenbaum's contention: that microkernel was possibly superior to monolithic architecture because of the stability of the kernel space?

I'm a little excited by the possibility of a solid Open MK, but a little dismayed at the thought that I may have to re-read Tannenbaum and Wirth (Oberon Project) to figure out what's going on. Does anyone have a link to an overview/comparison of kernel architectures? If so, this old fart thanks you.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Suhas]

Dude, if the driver dies then by definition the kernel cannot communicate with the hard drive. How will any data get corrupted?

Re:Benchmarks?

[Malor]

If the system is able to stay up without further drive access, that could potentially allow you to copy data still in RAM. If the OS simply instantly failed when the HD controller went, then any data in RAM would absolutely be lost.

Software failure is more common than hardware. In many cases, drivers can be restarted. Your specific example is probably the toughest one I can think of offhand... you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD :)). But most drivers wouldn't be that hard to restart... video and network are two very good examples. I have seen many 2.4 kernel crashes from what appeared to be network-driver failures. Presumably, a microkernel might have survived whatever the problem was.

You also, of course, have the advantage of each driver/process running in its own address apace, which would probably make very complex code, like the 2.6 Linux kernel, more manageable.

Just as an offhand observation, I kind of wonder if the 2.6 Linux kernel isn't approaching the level of diminishing returns... it's gotten so complex that it's getting pretty tough to cleanly improve without blowing a lot of stuff up. A microkernel design would probably have made maintenance easier, and *probably* would have given us more stable systems now.

But they didn't go that way, and restarting Linux kernel development would be pretty stupid, IMO. :-)

Re:Benchmarks?

[TheRaven64]

On BeOS, when the sound subsystem crashed you would get a message informing you of this, and it would automatically attempt a restart. On Windows or Linux when the sound subsystem crashes, the odds are you've got a kernel panic (since the drivers run in kernel space).

Re:Benchmarks?

[ajv]

Windows XP's kernel is a modified microkernel design. Most people are unaware of this, but it means that the vast majority of the code your applications call are also running in user space. For example, on Windows 64 machines, there's a Windows 64 environment, a Windows 32 (WoW64) environment, and so on. In the olden days, there were DOS VDMs, POSIX, and OS/2 sub-systems.

Not every Windows or Linux driver is kernel-space, but most are.

However, with adequate testing, crashes due to buggy drivers are rare. If you choose to run crap drivers, of course you'll see problems. Including on

Re:Benchmarks?

[lokedhs]

But they didn't go that way, and restarting Linux kernel development would be pretty stupid, IMO. :-)

In a way, you could see the new HURD to be a restart of the Linux kernel development. I.e. a new, better(?), kernel. And I wouldn't call it stupid, quite the contrary. New development is always good.

The funny thing is that back when Linux was started, it could been seen as a restart of the HURD kernel development. What goes around comes around. :-)

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what "error messages" are for. You should try them out some time... might do you a lot of good.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the kernel can't communicate with the hard drive, it can't flush dirty blocks or journal data back to the drive. How will any data not become corrupted if you were unlucky enough to be in the middle of a write?

Re:Benchmarks?

[spuzzzzzzz]

Windows XP does not have a microkernel. Windows NT had a microkernel until version 4, when Microsoft decided that the performance penalty of a microkernel was too high, so they chucked all the driver stuff back into kernel space.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

if u were in the middle of a write then it doesn't matter whether u were in kernel or user space. a BSOD or a dead driver, your disk doesn't care.

Re:Benchmarks?

[colinleroy]

With Linux, drivers compiled as modules usually don't take the system with them when they crash. They provoke an Oops, which is taken care of properly by the kernel (contrary to drivers compiled statically, which do Panics when crashing).
When they corrupt memory, it's of course a different story.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only module that was converged with the kernel was the graphics subsystem. The NT kernel still remains a microkernel design to this day.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Lonewolf666]

Obviously, there are a few things that would require a backup driver.

If the graphics driver goes out, launch a basic VGA driver. It will look dead ugly, but it should allow you to save your open documents. Then reboot while your buddy next door, who is runnning Windows, is still cursing about his lost data.

I admit that the hard drive controller's driver is more difficult to get right. Maybe you could use a simplified driver as backup that is built for reliability and does without those features (DMA for instance?) that are hard to get right on that particular system.

For anything that is not immediately necessary to an ordered shutdown of the computer:
Display a warning message and stop that driver until next reboot.

Re:Benchmarks?

[ColdGrits]

No, we are not all agreed.

You might prefer your entire system to crash'n'burn because of a dodgy webcam driver, for example (or a buggy game controller driver, or a faulty TWAIN idriver, or a bad soundcard driver, or...), but I'd be much happier for just the webcam toi cease operation but still have the rest of the system working, thank you very much.

Re:Benchmarks?

[mangu]

If the graphics driver goes out, launch a basic VGA driver.

Well, this has always existed in Linux and any Unix-like OS running X-Window. When the graphics driver goes out, one can go to another machine in the net and use telnet or ssh to log in. Either that or use a dumb terminal or another computer with a terminal emulator, through an RS-232 cable in the COM1 port, which is the basic setup one often uses when developing device drivers.

Re:Benchmarks?

[julesh]

Your specific example is probably the toughest one I can think of offhand... you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD :)).

Note that you have to be able to load it from _somewhere_ in order to be able to bootstrap the system. I don't know how L4 solves this problem, but the toy microkernel I've been playing with for the last few years solves it by having a simple rom filesystem driver built into the kernel, and loading the drivers needed to bootstrap the rest of the system (i.e., the hard disk driver, the primary filesystem driver and the vfs layer driver) from that. If that crashes, you'd have a kernel panic, but it's highly unlikely as the code is _very_ simple -- it would probably indicate a serious hardware failure, in fact.

My system doesn't support restarting drivers at the moment, but in theory it could restart the hard disk driver if it crashed.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Moloch666]

Then usually when such a driver does oops rmmod driver; modprove driver doesn't usually get it for some reason. At least the system is still responding and I can safely restart the system. On the other hand such crashes seem to happen only with the nvidia driver and not very often. I don't think I've seen an from source driver panic before.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Malor]

Oh, I definitely never intended to imply that the HURD is stupid, not at all.

I was speaking specifcally about stopping development on the current Linux and starting over, which I think would be very dumb. Usually, rewriting a big software project from the ground up kills it. Mozilla, for instance, ceased to be a viable commercial force because of its rewrite; Microsoft ate it alive. Firefox is doing pretty well now, but no commercial entity could have made that mistake and survived, if selling browsers was its major source of revenue.

There's a huge amount of embecded knowledge on how PC hardware works buried in the Linux code, and rewriting that whole thing from scratch would be a gargantuan project. They've been working on it for, what, 11 years now? A total rewrite would take at least 3 or 4, during which all forward progress would stop. Just not a very good idea.

But I think it's great that the HURD is finally moving, at least a little bit. I will admit, I was a bit shocked that after roughly 15 years, they're just now able to load a program. But, hey, it's not like I needed it done last week or anything. :-) And they are, from what I can see, treading very new ground, and that's always slow.

Reiterating: the more OSes, the better. I just don't think they should start over on Linux itself.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Lonewolf666]

Of course, that requires having another computer. As I understand the theory, HURD would be able to start a replacement driver on the same machine. Which would help the Joe Sixpack who has only a single machine.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Malor]

Once you had that kind of restart working well enough to not corrupt your filesystems, (very hard!!, I would think the OS would become more resistant to things like partial memory failures. In theory, atleast, the OS might be able to detect that parts of the RAM were bad, and be able to restart services that had been loaded in the bad segments. Of course, if the kernel itself was loaded into bad RAM, you'd still be screwed. A memory failure in user space, however, should be a correctable problem.

Ideally, of course, you want working hardware, but it would be cool if the freeware OSes were resilient enough to handle at least some hardware failures.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats nice and all but we're talking about critical code here. If your disk driver dies on you in a micro kernel system you're just as much in the shit as if it dies on you in a monolithic kernel.

Your reference to TWAIN indicates your comparing HURD to Windows. Why not compare it to another monolithic system like Linux, were the vast majority of bad drivers simply cause an Oops in the module and nothing more? Perhaps because that would simply reinforce the point that the much vaunted stability in micro kernel systems isn't all that interesting after all?

Re:Benchmarks?

[Rich0]

I think his point is that:

1. Yes - if your filesystem code crashes, you could end up with a dirty filesystem.

2. Yes - if your hard drive code crashes, you could end up with a dirty hard drive.

But:

3. No - if your webcam driver crashes, you won't end up with a dirty hard drive.

Right now with linux, if a kernel-level driver of any kind panics, the whole thing goes down the tubes.

Certainly a little compartmentalization can't possibly hurt. It won't fix every problem, but it does prevent a small problem in a non-essential driver from taking down the whole system.

As you point out, it will still be critical for some pieces of code to just work without bugs at all. However, the amount of that code can be reduced in a microkernel design.

Also - I don't think TWAIN is windows-specific. I seem to recall using TWAIN on a Mac many a year ago...

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

O.K, admitedly TWAIN exists on non-Windows platform, but I've never heard of TWAIN on Linux or UNIX so my point still stands wrt. Linux v's. HURD.

What I'm trying to get at is that yes, in older monolithic systems you can take down the entire kernel with one driver, but newer monolithic system can offer some protection against this. While yes, it is still possible that a very badly written driver on Linux could cause file system corruption, it probably won't. This is not a certainty, but for the majority of users this is enough. Certainly for the majority of users the overhead from a micro kernel far outweighs the benefits the added protection from bad drivers offers.

Re:Benchmarks?

[vrt3]

Incorrect. In Andrew Tanenbaum's words: "Microsoft claimed that Windows NT 3.51 was a microkernel. It wasn't. It wasn't even close. Even they dropped the claim with NT 4.0." (http://www.linuxbusinessweek.com/story/44969.htm) .

Re:Benchmarks?

[Keith_Beef]

you'd have to have a copy of the HD controller cached somewhere to be able to restart it. (since, obviously, you can't load it from HD :))

Wouldn't the driver be on a read-only filesystem, maybe even ROM or a CompactFlash type device? I thought we were talking about writing data to the disc... so it's going to the data disc, not the system disc.

Maybe a paranoid designer of an experimental system would expect things to break often. Writing to disc A fails, buffer cache is flushed to disc B and verified, before trying to diagnose the problem with disc A.

Beef

Re:Benchmarks?

[Prod_Deity]

Since I have one of those proprietary 5.1 surrand sound cards that really aren't usuable without configuring ALSA, whenever the system boots up, it just crashes the sound subsystem, everything else runs perfectly fine.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

A microkernel reduces the number of critical places. You don't have a point. Try using qnx and kill off all sorts of services. They respawn just fine.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Savage650]

Wouldn't the driver be on a read-only filesystem, maybe even ROM or a CompactFlash type device

ROM: Yes, CompactFlash: NO. CF modules pretend to be IDE harddisks, they are attached to the HD controller and accessed using the HD controller driver. What you mean would be onboard flash; one or more flash parts mapped into the CPU's address space (just like ROM) which can be "magically" written to. Reading/writing them needs "physical memory access" rights, and if you want a filesystem (as opposed to, say, a single bootimage) you'll need a filesystem driver too (preferably one that is flash-friendly, like JFFS)

Maybe a paranoid designer of an experimental system would expect things to break often. Writing to disc A fails, buffer cache is flushed to disc B and verified, before trying to diagnose the problem with disc A.

This would require completely separate paths from userspace down to disks A and B. And by separate, i mean hard- and software: assume that drives A and B are connected to two distinct instances of "HD controller card XYZ": if you can't trust the XYZ-Driver, the data on B is suspect, too.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Kjella]

Contrast it with systems such as Windows and Linux where drivers are in kernel space and it is impossible to have a stable or secure system with poor drivers, and in fact most of the problems with Windows and Linux crashing is caused by buggy drivers running in kernel space.

And that's also why drivers in Linux (at least in my experience) are far superior and "just work". Seriously, I don't want my GFX card/network card/printer/webcam/whatever driver to crap out at any time, only to get "just restart it". Yes, they're buggy to begin with, and they take the house down, so you fix them. If I understand it correctly, the HURD kernel would have a fixed driver interface (being in its own keyspace and all), and what would that get you? Buggy closed-source drivers. Exactly what Linus is against, and mostly for good reasons.

Kjella

Re:Benchmarks?

[Tolleman]

Ermms? I belive that the Hurd team might dislike closed source drivers quite a bit more then Linus.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

TWAIN is an obsolete standard. No one uses it anymore. Welcome to last century.

Re:Benchmarks?

[stoborrobots]

How about a microkernel Linux?

Take the time to read their paper about performance and issues related to linux on L4 - interesting stats like a 5% penalty for L4, as compared to a 25% for Mach...

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Microkernel systems are always slightly slower because of the message passing overhead

Not necessarily true. The Hurd features a concept called "containers", which makes it possible that drivers pass data to applications without that the data ever has to be copied. In a traditional UNIX, this can be done with mem-mapping a file, but not with other items, so it is possilbe that GNU/HURD runs faster than GNU/Linux for some tasks.

Re:Benchmarks?

[sleepingsquirrel]

There's more than just device driver isolation. Think about all the virtualization techniques out there (Xen, User Mode Linux, VMware, QEmu, Plex86, Linux VServer, etc.) Now think about what it would be like if high levels of process isolation were available "Right-Out-of-the-Box". That's the whole idea behind a multi-server like the Hurd.

Re:Benchmarks?

[dsouth]

Also - I don't think TWAIN is windows-specific. I seem to recall using TWAIN on a Mac many a year ago...

You're correct, TWAIN is a standard. The MacOS X image caputure tool supports TWAIN drivers. I use it all the time to drive my Epson Scanner (beats the heck out of Epson's software).

imac:~ dsouth$ uname -a
Darwin imac.local 7.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.7.0: Sun Nov 7 16:06:51 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.9.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

imac:~ dsouth$ ls /Library/Image\ Capture/TWAIN\ Data\ Sources/
EPSON Stylus CX5400.ds

Re:Benchmarks?

[buraianto]

"Mozilla" (Netscape) wasn't killed because of the rewrite. They were killed because version 4.7x sucked, and they couldn't compete with free as in beer.

The article isn't saying that they could only just now boot HURD, it is saying that they moved from the Mach microkernel to the L4 microkernel, and since the move they have just been able to run programs.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact I think the GNU people would go so far as to say that any closed source binary driver would be a GPL violation.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Daniel]

That doesn't help if your graphics driver has crashed the kernel.

Daniel

Re:Benchmarks?

[braindead]

The compartmentalization you're talking about is actually in development now. See the Nooks project at http://nooks.cs.washington.edu/ they have code there that you can download for Linux, which allow your kernel to survive a driver crash.

I think it's really nice how Linux, by making the code accessible, allows smart people to improve it in ways that were not originally in the plan.

Re:Benchmarks?

[mp3phish]

Are there hooks to install modules for "trusted" device drivers to allow them to run in kernel space faster for devices which require high performance? (Such as network cards in servers, 3D graphics, low latency Audio drivers, etc...)

Maybe it would be good to have a hybrid kernel which allows only userspace drivers in general but vendors who wish to certify their drivers and have them crypo signed can get them installed in high performance kernel space?

Is this a viable idea (in the longer term obviously) or is it just completely off the wall?

Re:Benchmarks?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"Just as an offhand observation, I kind of wonder if the 2.6 Linux kernel isn't approaching the level of diminishing returns... it's gotten so complex that it's getting pretty tough to cleanly improve without blowing a lot of stuff up. A microkernel design would probably have made maintenance easier, and *probably* would have given us more stable systems now."

No. That's just the fact that they're doing active development on it. If they'd leave it alone for a few months it would stabalize.

Re:Benchmarks?

[anthony_dipierro]

most of the problems with Windows and Linux crashing is caused by buggy drivers running in kernel space

When was the last time you had your Windows or Linux system crash? Personally it's been years for me. Maybe this will make driver development easier, but other than that I don't really see the point in practical terms.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

When the drivers are just user processes like in HURD then a faulty driver can't crash the system and if it goes berserk it'll just get terminated

Isn't OS X a microkernel design? If so, then is your statement also true of OS X?

Re:Benchmarks?

[connorbd]

Microkernel Linux was already done, by Apple, as a prelude to MacOS X (I think they did it mostly to understand the Mach technology). It was an interesting idea, and at the time it was the only freeware OS that'll run on a NuBus Power Mac, but after it got off the ground it was superseded by LinuxPPC, which was ultimately backported to the NuBus machines. It exists now only as a curiosity, and it's so far behind the times that it's really only worth it as an academic exercise.

Re:Benchmarks?

[pchan-]

The BeOS sound subsystem, the Media Server as they call it, is a user-space daemon, not a driver. It is analogous to artsd, the KDE sound daemon (which can crash and restart successfully). The BeOS soundcard driver, similar to ALSA, if crashed would bring the OS down with it.

Re:Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is false, or misleading. It's true that Win32 apps call library code in user space to access OS functionality, but that code is a thin layer that mostly provides thunks to undocumented system calls. Check out these byte counts from my XP SP2 machine for key user mode OS components that expose callable entry points for Win32 applications:

csrss.exe 6,144
user32.dll 577,024
kernel32.dll 983,522
gdi32.dll 278,016
ntdll.dll 708,096

In other words, they are very small relative to the overall OS footprint.

Re:Benchmarks?

[k8to]

Interesting. Under BeOS 4.x my sound would sometimes drop out permanently and never recover. No message and no sound.

I have never had this problem on Linux save when I briefly flirted with commercial drivers for the Terratec 64. "Open Sound System" was always a joke.

It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

To me HURD is like, well, like a missed opportunity.

Re:It hurds

[mirko]

The Hurd Project was started in 1983 (it's an instrumental featuring the speech where Stallman explained the origin of the GNU project).
Now, 22 years later, a definitve breakthrough has been performed.
I see this as an excitement :

1. They kept working on it THAT long despite slandering and scepticism such as yours
   
2. The rest of the software library (glib, bash, etc.) is already ready
   
3. With Linux, Hurd and BSD amongst others, we are slowly getting back to the same variety we had 20 years ago, when we had to exchange basic listings and to port these onto various platforms (Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad, Sharp...)
   

Now, we will see it emerge and, why not, get sufficient audience to become unavoidable. In 20 years from now, it'll be like it's an opportunity as weel as any other so it's not missed, it just took time to emerge, like my favourite whisky.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could decide to restart it.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

To me HURD is like, well, like a missed opportunity.
Do you mean something like "if you never tried, you'll regret it for the rest of your life?"
Good job HURD people!

Re:It hurds

[pchan-]

To me HURD is like, well, like a missed opportunity

I see HURD more like a bad simile.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

it just took time to emerge

Cue the jokes about Gentoo GNU/Hurd...

Re:It hurds

[DenDave]

Hurd may still present a good opportunity. It actually reminds me a little of Rhapsody's beginnings at Apple. The concept is very sound and as Linux with it's growing boy of a kernel steams headlong onto the desktop and "rich" platforms, hurd may possibly be next high performance open source platform.

Re:It hurds

[mirko]

It's a beginning : Mankind also had a glacial period and it finally sent a probe to Titan so evolution is asymptotically positive and exponentially accelerating.
I gave Hurd a try 3 years ago.
It was an x86 laptop and as nothing was recognized, not even my video board, I gave up. But it was cool to code in Perl and to dynamically try drivers under this exciting environment.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, 22 years later, a definitve breakthrough has been performed. I wonder if even Duke Nukem will manage to make a 'definitive breakthrough' given that timeframe :)

Re:It hurds

[Derf the]

"Mankind also had a glacial period and it finally sent a probe to Titan"

It has saddened, but not suprised me to hear of the demise of 'Mankind'. I had long suspected they would reach the stage of 'bloody big rockets' and then not survive much passed it.
I would be interested to read sometime just which technology they eventually tripped on.

Re:It hurds

[aled]

Evolution is change and adaption to environment, there's nothing about it being positive or accelerating. That is a common myth in that mankind evolutions to a "higher" state being. Our race could evolution to small white mouses for all we know.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're basically trying to say that glacial software development and many incompatible platforms is a good thing?

They're both Posix kernels. Competition between multiple alternative kernels is a good thing. Even if the conclusion is, as I guess you would like it to be, that everything implemented in HURD is worse than anything implemented in Linux, that would still be valuable knowledge gained.

Re:It hurds

[mpathetiq]

It could also [b]evolution[/b] to a race that doesn't use nouns as verbs.

Re:It hurds

[halivar]

it just took time to emerge

Damn, those Gentoo guys don't miss a beat, do they?

Re:It hurds

[mpathetiq]

Hopefully I'll evolution to a being that uses HTML properly... dammit.

Re:It hurds

[Outsider_99]

> The rest of the software library (glib, bash, etc.) is already ready And very mature

Re:It hurds

[Alan Partridge]

EVOLVE you schmuck.

Everything is not a fucking verb.

And it's MICE!

Re:It hurds

[10Ghz]

IMO the problem with HURD is pretty simple: They didn't have anything working. I mean, look at Linux. Linus offered version 0.01 to everyone. People got interested and started giving Linus patches that made the system better. Linux started improving at a faster and faster pace, until it became something really great. Linux was crap in the beginning, but at least it was out there and people could use it and imprve it.

Contrast to HURD: handful of developers worked on it. It seems that the never really released anything, since the system was not "perfect" yet. If they had something, ANYTHING that the user could have used, their userbase would have increased quite fast, as would the rate of progress. But no. They just kept on trying to achieve perfection, and the result was stagnating developement. When they thought they had something "perfect", they noticed that it was in fact sucky, so they scrapped it and moved to a new technology. By this rate, when they have their "perfect" system ready, it will resemble Linux 1.0. in features and performance. But hey, at least it's "perfect"!

How the hell it took them 22 years, whereas Linux only needed to 14 years to move from cobbled-together wannabe-OS in to a world-class OS that powers anything from PDA's to supercomputers? By this rate, it will take HURD another 20 years to be where Linux is TODAY!

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

Once they can actually load a program and get it to run, can we say HURD is dying!?

Re:It hurds

[Chreo]

there's nothing about it being positive or accelerating

You cannot speak of evolution as being on a scale of just positive/negative. However, evolution is always "positive" in the notion that is always leads to a higher fitness (the biological term).

Evolution has certainly accelerated during certain periods of time for different species (for instance check the evolution of ray-finned fishes, teleosts).

That is a common myth in that mankind evolutions to a "higher" state being. Our race could evolution to small white mouses for all we know.

Evolution leads to higher fitness. That is the "higher state". If you by higher state mean "more intelligent" or "just better(tm)" then you are semi-correct. The thing is, that "more intelligent" or "just better" often gives better fitness.

No, given that our environment doesn't change very radically, we will not evolve into small mice. Why? Because that niche is already filled with very fit species and it is not like their niche is better for us (as it is a side-effect of our living conditions). It is far more likely that little white mice will evolve into larger intelligent creatures than humanity going the opposite route, even given extremely radical environmental changes. We'll be extinct before such changes would be necessary.

Next time you try to debunk "myths" about something, try to know what you are talking about.

Re:It hurds

[cosmo7]

No, given that our environment doesn't change very radically, we will not evolve into small mice.

It doesn't have to change at all. Suppose we become over-crowwded and consequently have smaller areas to live in, with less food and less hygiene. Fortune will favor the smaller. Throw in a few severe winters and the furrier members of our society will be the ones who reproduce.

You can already see this kind of evolution happening here in New York.

Re:It hurds

[ValentineMSmith]

... it just took time to emerge, like my favourite whisky.

Or like Gentoo 2004.3 on my laptop.

Re:It hurds

[The Slashdot Guy]

Evolution isn't a verb either.

Re:It hurds

[Chreo]

While I mostly believe your post was supposed to be funny:

It doesn't have to change at all. Everything always changes, it is part of the nature of life. Suppose we become over-crowded

that's a big change

and consequently have smaller areas to live in, with less food and less hygiene.

We've already been exposed to that throughout our evolution and many are still today.

Fortune will favor the smaller.

Size matters little for overcrowding. Numbers do. Overpopulation will give us severe wars and then that issue is settled, just look at lemmings. Neither does small size help a bad hygene. Hygene btw is doubtful as a thing driving evolution, given the conditions that we're coming from. Too good hygene, most likely, are the cause of many of todays problem with allergenes and the allergics they give rise to, i.e. we're most likely tuned to a much more dirty environment than our clean homes and offices.

Throw in a few severe winters and the furrier members of our society will be the ones who reproduce.

That's a change too... but tell that to the eskimoes. Cold environment, btw, actually favors larger shapes due to surface/volume ratios being more beneficial (larger volume to produce heat and less surface to lose the heat from). Look at the arctic and sea-living mammals as a reference (seals, whales etc).

Our intellect has given us the tools to fix the short term (less that 50k years) changes in our environment without having to resort to evolution to fix it for us.

Re:It hurds

[aled]

Perhaps I'll EVOLVE to be a fucking english writer, but english is not my fucking first language.
I thank you (schmuck?) for letting me learn some fucking good language use.

Re:It hurds

[aled]

The thing is, that "more intelligent" or "just better" often gives better fitness.

But being inteligent enough to do nuclear or biological massive destruction weapons may lead to just the end of your race, so it may lead to lesser fitness, isn't it?

It is far more likely that little white mice will evolve into larger intelligent creatures than humanity going the opposite route, even given extremely radical environmental changes.

Changes are random like cosmic ray altering dna, if one survives them enough to breed there's nothing preventing such an evolution happening. Perhaps fast breeding mouses have more chance of survival than humans in some environment not so far from this.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

You should study a bit about OS design before talking bullshit.

Linux is a monolithic old-fashion design which has taken decades to be developed. Linus used Minix as a base at the beginning, and books like "The Design of the UNIX Operating System" of Maurice Bach to develop Linux, so, using approximately 20 years of innovations, studies and well tested features about monolithics kernels.

Now, the Hurd is a totally new concept,using the first microkernel approach of the 80's researching with Mach, and they were able to get something workin (even with lot of problems, licensing stuff,little developers) for 1994, everything from scratch, not only the code but also the ideas.
Now we have a good system with GNU/Mach Hurd, and they have decided (decision taken a few years ago actually) to port the Hurd to the second generation of microkernel with L4, check the status of the project of such a microkernel, and you will see it is something pretty new (what we can consider new for researching) offering a set of features that improves a lot the realibility of the systems, among new concepts, and
today, we already have a Hurd port that can even run a program!!!!! , this is even something to tell to our grand-childs.

Watching the events in this way (and i think it is the right way), you will see that 22 years has been little time for the Hurd, and that 22 years of development for the Hurd are around 44 years of development for Linux.

Re:It hurds

[Chreo]

But being inteligent enough to do nuclear or biological massive destruction weapons may lead to just the end of your race, so it may lead to lesser fitness, isn't it?

Not really. What we've created in nuclear research and biotech is if you thing about it a little nothing different from global warming or a supernova exploding nearby i.e. extinction events.

In fact, those bright enough to build the stuff are usually the ones who are most vocal about not using it in the other end. Those pushing the button are usually a magnitude less bright (most likely off-scale stupid).

There are other issues, social standard etc, with intelligence and fitness but higher average intelligence in a person will likely give that person higher fitness.

Changes are random like cosmic ray altering dna, if one survives them enough to breed there's nothing preventing such an evolution happening.

Not really. Random changes propagating in our gene pool are always subject to the concept of fitness. If they are neutral in terms of fitness then they spread by chance (but due to the stocastic nature of their propagation usually disappears rather rapidly). The changes required, going from human to mouse, are NOT neutral given our living environment and will therefor give lower fitness => swift elimination from the gene pool (unless the envionment changes).

You also have to remember that just being able to breed is not enough for changes to survive in the gene pool. Fitness also takes into consideration the survivability/fitness of your offspring.

Perhaps fast breeding mouses have more chance of survival than humans in some environment not so far from this.

You have to consider that you can only compare fitness between two species if they have the same food niche. Mice usually lives of of what man creates and if there were any real competition between men and mice then they'd not stand a chance.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many folks who simply disagree with Tannenboum assertion that linux because it is based on monolithic kernel is obsolite. That is not quite true anymore, since at this time, Linux evolved into a modular kernel, which is in many respects superior to microkernel design.

Re:It hurds

[Alan Partridge]

Aled? Are you Welsh?

Re:It hurds

[anamexis]

Hopefully it will evolve into a being that knows both proper English and HTML.

Re:It hurds

[aled]

No, I'm from Argentina. Its from my name (ALEjandro D.) When I took the id it seemed a funny double meaning and weird that it wasn't already used.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

There are also many folks who see modern Linux based systems as proving Tannenbaum's point.

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

With Linux, Hurd and BSD amongst others, we are slowly getting back to the same variety we had 20 years ago...

More variety is better, no doubt about it. It is a shame that all of the flourishing crowd of "alternatives" are all Unix clones (or at least strongly Unix flavored). Atheos and others ignored for the moment, until they have more than a dozen users.

To bring true diversity to the platform ecosystem, we need some viable workstation platforms that aren't yet-another-unix-clone. http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~costanza/lisp-ecoop/sub missions/Egdorf.pdf

Mods...

[GreyWolf3000]

Please mod down any posts that mention Duke Nukem: Forever.

Except this one, of course.

Re:Mods...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing it will be more Daikatana than DNF.

Re:Mods...

[heydonms]

Oh come on DNF is comedy gold! In soviet russia gold is... ok, nah your right, forget it

Re:Mods...

[Billly Gates]

I actually started the lame Duke Nukem posts as a joke, but oddly I had Mozilla mentioned as well. The netscape code finally after 2 years had to be deleted and rewritten.

After a slow start Mozilla is finally ready and moving fast.

Hopefully the same fate will happen with Hurd as soon as developers come and take it seriously. Its a selfulling prophesy in free software.

DNF? Well its proprietary so who knows

Re:Mods...

[Billly Gates]

Ya

My guess is Jimmy Buffet will be the Hurd spokesperson demonstrating DNF on the OS.

Re:Mods...

[DenDave]

DNF is a myth, a rumour, a faecetious joke.. it never existed and no-one has ever seen it.. It's software for the x-files... it brings a tear to my eyes.. *sniff*

Re:Mods...

[TheoMurpse]

Damn you! I was just going to mention it! Now I guess I cannot. Curse you and your quick thinking and infinite wisdom!

Re:Mods...

[peterpi]

Ooh, it never really crossed my mind that Duke Nukem Forever could be written 'DNF'.

I normally associate DNF with 'Did Not Finish', which is displayed instead of a time in motorsport races on TV. Quite appropriate really :)

(I hope I'm not just being really really slow and that everybody else got the joke on day one ;)

Re:Mods...

[wolrahnaes]

"(I hope I'm not just being really really slow and that everybody else got the joke on day one ;)"

yes, you are and yes, we did.

Re:Mods...

[peterpi]

heheh, oh well :)

Re:Mods...

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Dude, no! It's going to be the launch title for the Infinium Labs portable, which comes complete with a sticker that triples the battery life!

Re:Mods...

[meatspray]

Well, there's ehough anticipation through the years you'd think someone would have bought up the rights and made it just for whatever profit is available.

Sadly, after all these years of waiting and hype, there's no way in heck it could live up to expectations.

Re:Mods...

[ipjohnson]

Just remember it's better to DNF than DFL ....

Re:Mods...

[grammar fascist]

I normally associate DNF with 'Did Not Finish', which is displayed instead of a time in motorsport races on TV. Quite appropriate really :)

You are not a true geek. (Motorsport races?) DNF stands for "Disjunctive Normal Form."

There's a joke in there, somewhere.

Re:Mods...

[cheezit]

Hardly. DNF stands for "Dackus Nauer Form", which is a third generation derivative of BNF.

DNF ::= CNF+
CNF ::= BNF+ ...or something like that.

Re:Mods...

[Billly Gates]

No PCGamer back in 97 or 98 had an alpha demo of the game and showed screenshots of duke nukem having a battle with aliens on a highway, jumping from one vehicle to the next.

My theory is that it got canned but marketing never wanted to kill it incase they decided to ever rewrite it for the pc.

The console market was bigger so Duke Nukem had a release for the PS.

Re:Mods...

[Xabraxas]

True. When I ran track as long as you didn't finish DFL, (Dead Fucking Last, for those of you who don't know) you were good. "Just don't run DFL!"

Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[ggvaidya]

... if GNU/HURD comes out before Longhorn?

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already out now and it's actually somewhat useable. But then again, it's lacking various features you might want and it doesn't do anything special that might make you want to use it.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Scaz7]

You beat me to that comment..

I guess it's back to lurking in the shadows of the ee-ter-net waiting for another slashdot story the come out in which I have some cunning or slightly witty comment to comment about...

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[kubrick]

It's already out now and it's actually somewhat useable. But then again, it's lacking various features you might want and it doesn't do anything special that might make you want to use it.

By this, do you mean GNU/HURD or Longhorn? :)

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[typhoonius]

Mark my words, 2005 will be the year of HURD on the desktop.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care what the critics are "saying", Hurd is ready for the desktop already. They've got a solid kernel, the GNU system, and can run applications to main().

All this ballyhoo about Hurd not being ready for the desktop is FUD from M$FT. You guys can stay with your buggy OS, I'll be happily hacking away on my *modern* operating system.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[njvic]

Come on... Microsoft will never live up to HURD. Everybody knows it takes many Longhorns to make one HURD.

*ducks*

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[hdparm]

Both.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[bkhl]

GNU/HURD is out, it's just not very useful yet.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[commodoresloat]

All this ballyhoo about Hurd not being ready for the desktop is FUD from M$FT.

Uhhh, yeah. That ummmm big anti-HURD ad campaign that Microsoft is running on all the TV stations.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god the mods have humour :-)

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[yincrash]

Quack!Quack!Quack!Quack!Quack!Quack!Quack!Quack!Qu ack! *ducks*

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Zemplar]

Yikes, a HURD based on Longhorn?

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[KarmaMB84]

That's why there will be a HURD of Longhorn SKUs!

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[PMuse]

Microsoft will never live up to HURD. Everybody knows it takes many Longhorns to make one HURD.

1. Longhorns always follow the HURD.
2. The HURD is led by longhorns.
3. Cannot . . . compute . . . para . . . dox. [fzzzzzt]
4. ???
5. Profit.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[djdavetrouble]

Mark my words, 2005 will be the year of HURD on the desktop.
I am going to start a project to rename every friggin FOSS project there is to gain popularity. I happen to know a little about publicity and advertising, and I can tell you right off the bat that products like the gimp, hurd, lame, gnu, etc etc will never gain widespread acceptance until they have a more marketable name. Case in point: Mozilla --> Firefox.

Hurd will now be known as (dropping all of the stupid recursive abbreviation crap that RMS is so fond of) FUTURINO OPERATING SYSTEM .

The Gimp will now be called PHOTOFRIEND.

Lame is hereby dubbed - MUSICSHRINK 5000.

Gnu/Emacs shall become - WORD-O-LATOR FREE

and so on...

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[rocketfairy]

Mark my words, 2055 will be the year of HURD on the desktop. As soon as they implement support for scroll wheels and holoprojectors, they're set.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[larien]

Dammit, where's the -1 corny moderator option?

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[forkazoo]

True story - My boss, head of our IT department, came to me one day, because I had mentioned Vorbis, and so he knew I knew something about audio compression.

"What is wrong with MP3?"
"Huh?"
"I downloaded a program to make my music into MP3 format, so that my Real Jukebox will play it, but the program says that MP3's are lame. Is it just saying that it's outdated technology?"
"Oh, no, lame is the name of the program that converts the music into the MP3 format. It's very common, and the program you downloaded probably uses that encoding program to make MP3's."
"Why in the hell did they give it such a stupid name?"

Though, if we call it MUSICSHRINK 5000, there will be rumors about a MUSICSHRINK 6000! (Anybody see the gruntmaster 6000 episode of dilbert?)

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Bob 4knee]

Come on... Microsoft will never live up to HURD. Everybody knows it takes many Longhorns to make one HURD.

*ducks*

A hurd of ducks is called a "flock".

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[wed128]

Hold it right there. Mozilla was not renamed firefox for marketing reasons.

Firefox and Mozilla are seperate aplications. Originally, firefox was called pheonix. This name conflicted with another software package, so it was renamed Firebird. Again, this name was already taken, so Firebird begat Firefox.

Marketing has nothing to do with it.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[G-funk]

Nah it's all good, RMS is doing well enough on his own anti HURD campaign.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Rysc]

anybody see the gruntmaster 6000 episode of dilbert?

Anyone NOT see that episode of Dilbert?

Thought so.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[djdavetrouble]

yeah but it worked for my funny !

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[djdavetrouble]

exactly. And those people comprise 99% of the population ! They r not 1337.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Bas_Wijnen]

Gnu/Emacs

I can't help but wonder if all you guys really don't understand what RMS means, or just pretend. I'll try to explain it anyway.

GNU is an operating system. Hurd is the kernel of the GNU operating system. Because this kernel is part of the GNU project, it is called GNU Hurd, similar to "Microsoft Windows".

Linux is also a kernel. It can be used with the GNU operating system instead of its native kernel. The result is still a GNU operating system, but some people prefer to mention "Linux" in it for several reasons. In that case it should be called "GNU/Linux", as "a combination of the GNU operating system and the Linux kernel", but definitely not "GNU Linux", which would mean "Linux, made by/as part of GNU".

"GNU/Emacs" means the GNU operating system, combined with Emacs. That doesn't make much sense, as Emacs is part of the GNU operating system. It should be called "Emacs" or "GNU Emacs", if you want to state explicitly that it is part of the GNU project.

An exception is "GNU/Hurd". This is just GNU, which runs its native kernel, GNU Hurd. The reason that this phrasing can be useful is because "GNU/Linux" can also be called "GNU". To differentiate between "GNU/Linux" and "GNU/Hurd", it makes sense to write them thusly.

That wasn't so hard, now was it? If I see any of you making that mistake again, I'll subtract 10 points from your score. Now get back to work.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Random832]

You're absolutely right - Emacs isn't a kernel ...yet

This story is under the wrong section,

[Anonymous Coward]

which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4. He says: 'We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!'"

this needs to be file under "Its funny, laugh"

It can be molded in any way we want!

[Dancin_Santa]

Just like a computer with nothing on it, it's a blank slate.

Perhaps a blank slate would be better because it's only a matter of hours to get a working Linux system on one.

what about second?

[nocomment]

Maybe the second program should be a better web server.

Re:what about second?

[Anonymous Coward]

..or duke nukem forever ;)

Re:what about second?

[mangu]

Do you mean that, since they finally got to the stage where Linux was in 1991, they should now start rewriting Apache from scratch?

Re:what about second?

[pommiekiwifruit]

It's the open-source way. After that, they can write a better text editor.

Re:what about second?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that the server link to the story might withstand the traffic....

Re:what about second?

[grammar fascist]

After that, they can write a better text editor.

And after that, a new window manager! They could call it HURDMaker.

I'm quivering with anticipation already.

Re:what about second?

[SnowZero]

No, he's referring to this story: GNU/Hurd Web Server Online
I remember that slashdotting the first time around... pretty funny to link a beta OS up like that to be taken down in minutes by the hoard.

Re:what about second?

[CapnGrunge]

Uh, they have already done it.
Yes, I like emacs better than vi, except I can't get friggin' real tabs...

Re:what about second?

[cpghost]

they should now start rewriting Apache from scratch?

Why should they? thttpd fits a tiny microkernel very well!

Re:what about second?

[Unknown Lamer]

Actually the machine never died, just the pfinet server.

OMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a joke, right? Please tell me there isn't anybody out there who still believes that the Hurd will ever be anything more than the wet dream that everyone snickers up their sleeve at Stallman about.

Re:OMFG

[Pflipp]

While there are many "dying" projects out there (remember the "Windows replacements OS" hype?), HURD has always had the most of critique, mainly because it embodied the very promise of a GNU system to many people in its days.

But putting the whole history aside, you could see HURD as an exercise in OS development following the route of the more progressive design theories. You might be able to imagine how this pulls the interest of a small group of developers over a longer time, despite of the fact that development is going slowly.

You know how Free Software has the ability to evolve and persist aside from political influences, well, here is your new schoolbook example.

Re:OMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

No, HURD has had the most critique because it's taken them 22 fucking years to come up with something that is still totally unusable. Even HURD/Mach is a waste of disk space; 2Gb partition limits? In 2005? What the blue flying fuck is that?

Even if HURD/L4 gets to the same level as HURD/Mach it'll still be ten years out of date and trailing behind even small hobby type OS's in terms of real, tangible, every day features. HURD is an accedemic excersise of the worst type.

Re:OMFG

[TheRaven64]

To a computer scientist, HURD is far more interesting than Linux or even BSD. It is based on a solid theoretical work, and should prove more stable, maintainable and adaptable than monolithic kernel approaches. To a 13 year old running around shouting `Linux is teh r0x0rz,' it is of no interest at all.

Re:OMFG

[essreenim]

Exactly. Fair play to the guys that stuck at. It is at lest an implementation of what was previously a theoretical OS before. It should now be used only for educational purposes so that students can see different paradigms and see that there doesn't have to be a one size fits all OS. But thats all. I think the developers who work on it would probably be better off working on something more produvtive now..

Re:OMFG

[orasio]

You are not paying them to develop it, so they can take 100 years to make it, if they want or like.
That 2Gb thing again.

It's not a product.
They don't sell it, you don't have to buy it.
It might even be usable, because you can join partitions.

HURD is a hacker exercise of the best type!

Everyday features means little to OS developers. They can define what everyday features are. When you quit complaining, and when and if you get to see the birth of some GNU/HURD/L4 1.0, you will get the most advanced kernel at the time it's released, because noone is working more seriously on an advanced design.

Re:OMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

Well hang on, I never said that those working on GNU/Hurd should stop, or do something else. I never demanded that they fix the 2Gb partition limit nor any other bug or misfeature.

What I'm complaining about are the idiots like yourself who talk about GNU/Hurd as if it should be considered a serious competitor or alternative to Linux. It clearly isn't. It's barely functional. Claiming that people critique Hurd for reason X, Y and Z is just Amiga Persecution Complex applied to Hurd. You can't accept that Hurd is miles behind pretty much everyone else and it's never, ever, going to catch up with the real world. Hurd is an academic toy, a novelty. Things like the 2Gb limit and the hoopla over this L4 milestone prove that.

Re:OMFG

[orasio]

1 - noone complained about your bitching.

2 - noone said GNU/HURD is an alternative to GNU/Linux right now, I specifically pointed out that _if_ and when it's released, it will be the best OS design available, ages ahead of Linux in design, meaning among other things portability, ease of developement, driver writeability. It's much easier to adapt a microkernel to multiple cores, coprocessor usage, like cheap GPUs, clusters. It's a design for today and tomorrow needs. Linux is a nice kernel, because it's there, but it's not beautiful. If and when the GNU/Hurd is a reality, it will be a better reality.

3 - No, I don't care about being trolled, I enjoy just answering random bullshit.

Re:OMFG

[ajs318]

..... Which would be fine, except that microkernels don't work in practice. The theory is fine on a chalkboard. It just breaks down because most of the time, in real life, people aren't using their computers in anything like the way the theoreticians modelled. The hardware you use all the time -- keyboard, display, disc controller -- might just as well have their drivers right there in kernel space, than eating a process in user space. And if the necessary checks and balances are implemented in the kernel space driver -- rather than in a user space driver which then passes its own pre-sanitised data to a kernel space "microdriver" which just chucks it straight at the port -- then they can never be bypassed by any malicious code in user space.

Occasionally hardware can fail in ways the driver was not expecting, but that just says "badly written driver!" The temporary workaround is to compile the driver as a module; then, if the batteries run down on your digital camera in the middle of transferring a load of snapshots, you can always rmmod usb-storage && modprobe usb-storage to reload the driver {after plugging in the mains adapter, of course .....}.

By exactly the same token, the Fire Brigade could save a fortune if people had to book in advance when their houses were going to burn down, and the National Health Service could save a fortune if people had to book in advance when they were going to be ill.

Re:OMFG

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the AC's point is that it will never be released in a usable fashion by moden standards and thus is irrelevant. You can't claim it will be the best "OS design available" when it is in its current state of development.

Re:OMFG

[LWATCDR]

Yes and no.
HURD is interesting but so is Linux. Look at things like OpenMosix and the work Google is doing.

Re:OMFG

[LWATCDR]

What about QNX? it is microkernel based and seem to work very well in practice.

I tend to agree with you that the ideal system would by somewhere between a microkernel and a monolithic.
The comment that you can always rmmod usb-storage && modeprobe usb-storage is so geekish.
An ideal system would handle that for you.

what 1st program?

[spongman]

that 1st program wasn't a web server by any chance, was it?

Re:what 1st program?

[ladybugfi]

No, it was pr0n of course.

Yeah, mod this funny, but also look at the image on the article!

Mach Microkernel vs L4

[TangoCharlie]

What are the relative benefits of L4 vs the Mach Microkernel? Better performance? As I understand it, MacOS X's microkernel is also based on the Mach microkernel... would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

The L4 kernel is built around the x86 (really all modern CPUs) concept of processor "rings". The kernel itself resides at ring0, drivers at ring1, and so on.

The big thing is that in ring0, no one can interrupt you. So a kernel can run many cycles uninterrupted by applications. Mainly, this is used for scheduling and precise timing.

What L4 seeks to do is bring all levels of processing out to ring4. By doing this, they minimize the amount of code that cannot be preempted. (I'm sure you've heard about the pre-empted Linux kernel) So with everything running with near-identical process traits, problems like resource starvation and priority inversion simple do not happen. They can't happen, in fact, and that makes the L4 system especially well-suited for embedded systems as well as hard real-time systems.

But this comes at a tradeoff. Since the kernel is no longer running in ring0, the speed of system calls is dramatically reduced. However, because interrupts are handled in a logical manner, system responsiveness is much faster. It's a tradeoff, like most things in computer software.

It will be interesting to see, as this kernel matures, how well the operating system stacks up against Linux.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not. The Darwin kernel is really a monolithic layer over the top of a microkernel, not a proper microkernel system. Historically, at least, you gave up too much speed to do a proper microkernel, so monolithic kernels were de rigeur in any application outside the OS laboratory. Just because Darwin is written atop of Mach, it doesn't necessarily follow that Darwin uses a microkernel; and the design of Darwin is that of a monolithic kernel, not a microkernel.

The Hurd is an interesting design. With luck, it will demonstrate both that the performance hit is no longer of major importance, and that a true microkernel has advantages over monolithic kernels. Only time will tell, of course, if those advantages are going to be properly exploited; but I must admit to curiosity as to what might be implemented above the Hurd that would not be possible (or would be significantly harder) with Linux.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[js7a]

L4 has only seven system calls, compared to several dozen in Mach. It fits in about 32KB, too, which is very much smaller than Mach.

But the small size doesn't make most systems faster. Running the same Unix API, L4 adds execution time overhead beyond the default monolithic Linux kernel, about 5%. (Does anyone know the figure for Linux-on-Mach? I know it's much greater than 5%....) However, there are some significant advantages having to do with debugging, maintainability, SMP, real time gaurentees, memory management, configurability, robustness, etc. Detailed discussion here.

From the overview:

Kernels based on the L4 API are second-generation -kernels. They are very lean and feature fast, message-based, synchronous IPC, simple-to-use external paging mechanisms, and a security mechanism based on secure domains (tasks, clans and chiefs). The kernels try to implement only a minimal set of abstractions on which operating systems can be built flexibly.

Other links: L4KA homepage, background info, more info with some historical L3 links.

Frankly, I think L4 is very much the right way to do things. I wish I could say the same for other parts of HURD.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[CptChipJew]

Mach is 3mb...I think

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[joib]

This article explains the philosphy behind L4, and how it's different from Mach.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[BJH]

Does anyone know the figure for Linux-on-Mach? I know it's much greater than 5%....

MkLinux (Linux running on the original series of PowerMacs) was a Linux-on-Mach system. In comparison to the monolithic PPCLinux, it had a performance penalty of around 15-20%.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent sounds like a bad troll to me ... sometimes it's just scary at the amount of misinformation you get from comments in Slashdot.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

In this latest pistachio, there are more than 7 systemcalls, I believe.

In any case, I think 5% is a very reasonable bottom line figure that you can expect for the current implementation.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[jeif1k]

As I understand it, MacOS X's microkernel is also based on the Mach microkernel...

It is, but it's unclear whether OS X's version of Mach is still much of a microkernel.

would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?

Well, ask yourself this question: given Apple's limited resources, where do they get the most return on their investment of time and effort? Probably the UI and consumer products (eg iPod).

OSS can afford to explore those kinds of technologies because there are so many OSS developers, but Apple has to focus.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this is fairly wrong but some of the truth is there.

The x86 uses rings but everything else just uses the supervisor vs user state (since that is all anyone uses the x86 for: rings 0 (supervisor) and 3 (user)).

You can be interrupted in ring 0 (on x86) or other architectures' kernel privilege level. They usually have an interrupt state flag that needs to be set but, as far as I know, this never has to do with privilege level (except that most interrupts turn it off so that you can clear the interrupt).

There is no "ring 4". On x86 it is "ring 3" (there are 2 bits for the ring level) and other chips just have "user mode" (hence, this is the generic term for this state).

Resource starvation and priority inversion have nothing to do with the notion of CPU privilege levels and can both occur on L4.

The real power to a microkernel comes from the modularity. It is much easier to maintain several small programs than one large one. Plus, it means that any problem in one of them harms nobody else (and that process can later be restarted instead of bringing the whole system down like Linux would with a bug or faulty driver). Additionally, a lean microkernel can stay resident in CPU cache so all kernel code can be run without memory latency overhead (only memory access and device access causes a problem).

The disadvantage is that the additional level of indirection in the message-passing between processes takes longer than just jumping to the kernel to execute a function and then returning (it isn't quite that simple but you get the idea).

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[TheoMurpse]

What L4 seeks to do is bring all levels of processing out to ring4.

Do you mean ring3? Because there are only rings zero through three (which makes four). Somebody fails their computer counting!

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Pflipp]

As with NextStep in its days, the MacOS X "microkernel" was mainly based on Mach because it allowed fast development. The concept is called a "monolithic microkernel": a microkernel with just one "server" doing just about everything.

You will realise how long it took the (handful of) HURD developers to port to L4. I don't think Apple has any ambitions in that direction. It just wants to sell a working system.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[ehack]

I think the rings stem from Multics, a multiprocessor system which preceded Unix. (Unix is not Multics...) . Unix was simpler, but Multics had a lot of interesting stuff from the start, like many processors, disk-mapped processes that had persistent data from invocation to invocation etc. I don' really know why Multics went under, it was fun to use.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[ehack]

Yes; we need more accurate data here, if this should not be taken for a troll

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[bstone]

5% overhead for running a system that has all the features in reliability alone has got to be well worth it.

When you think about it, a system running 5% slower than today's system is only one month behind on Moore's curve. (2x performance in 18 months is 5%/month system speed increase). Wait an extra month to buy your next machine and you can have the same performance on a far sounder foundation. (Of course this assumes you're doing your conversion sometime after Hurd L4 actually runs the things you need).

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[essreenim]

But this comes at a tradeoff. Since the kernel is no longer running in ring0, the speed of system calls is dramatically reduced. However, because interrupts are handled in a logical manner, system responsiveness is much faster. It's a tradeoff, like most things in computer software.

Riight, so the advantage is I have to wait a much shorter amount of time to do something that will now take allot longer to do...

No, really, that does sound like there are some advantages in theory. However this rare set of theoretical advantages that I can dream up are pretty much never going to happen, making this the world's brand new obselete OS?

Forgive my ignorance.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

The real power to a microkernel comes from the modularity. It is much easier to maintain several small programs than one large one.

I recall RMS saying in Revolution OS that this turned out to be a serious disadvantage due to the difficulty in trying to debug the orchestration and multiple message flow between these many programs. This had something to do with things like having a context which was over a given message which could be subtly modified by some other event in the system. Whereas monolithic kernels like Linux could debug this type of thing in a more straight forward manner.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

The real power to a microkernel comes from the modularity. It is much easier to maintain several small programs than one large one.

GNU/HURD the microkernel from the people who brought you Emacs.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[leandrod]

> What are the relative benefits of L4 vs the Mach Microkernel?

L4 is being maintained and developed, while GNU would have to maintain Mach all by itself. Also, L4 is much simpler, thus at least potentially more reliable, safe, and a better platform for the multi-server microkernel architecture of the Hurd.

> As I understand it, MacOS X's microkernel is also based on the Mach microkernel...

Yes and no. I never found anyone who could justify Mac OS X (NeXTStep)'s use of Mach. They take the Mach codebase, but merge it with the BSD kernel; in this way they both loose BSD's simplicity, leanness and performance, and Mach's flexibility. The worse of both worlds.

The only benefit I could gather is the use of drivers made for MkLinux they formerly supported, but then they forfeit the much bigger codebase of, say, Linux or simple BSD drivers, or even the future codebase of L4 drivers, and get stuck where the Hurd is in the Mach codebase: doing it all by themselves as more and more projects get off Mach unto L4, simple BSD or Linux or anything else.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[leandrod]

> MkLinux (Linux running on the original series of PowerMacs) was a Linux-on-Mach system. In comparison to the monolithic PPCLinux, it had a performance penalty of around 15-20%.

AFAIR, it is still around in order to support NuBus Macs, and the performance penalty is from 10% to 15%.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[leandrod]

> L4 is very much the right way to do things. I wish I could say the same for other parts of HURD.

So why can't you say the other parts of the Hurd are the right way to do things? Specifically, please -- pointers would suffice.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[oudzeeman]

Apple doesn't use Mach as a microkernel. (They globbed the BSD compatibility layer into the kernel, in a real microkernel it would run as a 'mach server', same with lots of ofther stuff)

It probably wouldn't make any sense for them to look into L4

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[garethwi]

Well, this is fairly wrong but some of the truth is there.

A 'ring' of truth, perhaps?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[LWATCDR]

I can voice some opinion of what HURD is doing wrong.
It should be called YAFU. Yet another free Unix. We already have several free Unix like operating systems. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Darwin, and probably some more I do not know. Unix is great. It works. I remember back in the early 80s reading in Byte how someday everyone would be using Unix. Okay it is now 2005. Is Unix the best of all possible worlds. I would like the HURD team to be bold. Break away from Unix. Try and make something better. Look at BeOS. Let's ditch Unix and X and do something new and original. We have free OSs that work. Start working on something new. SMP, clustering, networking, graphics, security, scaleablity, and audio being part of the system from day one. Super high availability from clustered commodity boxes would be nice. You have a big app that needs more power? Just plug in another box and add it to your cluster. For compatibility use glibc, QT, and GTK libraries. Yes I know that with Hurd you could add these things in later but will anyone?
HURD today should be a research project. It really should not be Unix.
Right now it is just a different Unix.
Just a suggestion.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

> Right now it is just a different Unix.
That's not correct. The Hurd provides the POSIX API, but it also makes it possible to do very un-UNIX-y things, like let unprivileged users "mount" their own file systems.

Remember, Gnu's _NOT_ Unix!

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Daniel]

Of course, one reason the Hurd has encountered so much trouble is that it deviates wildly from the traditional Unix kernel design.

Daniel

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[wtrmute]

That's being foolish. There's plenty of "experimental" OSes around, many of them Free Software, like EROS; that isn't what the HURD should be doing. It shouldn't be this neat system where development breaks away completely from what programmers are used to writing, therefore guaranteeing that porting of applications will be a tedious, and ultimately fruitless, process.

What the HURD developers should be doing is (risking the wrath of the community) be less revolutionary, and get something going. The team spent God-knows-how-long stumped on that file system mmap() problem, which barred disks larger than 2GB from being mounted. If one runs across this kind of barrier during the development of a system, one should just drop the feature and use something else which is known to work, and leave that feature for version 2.0 or something.

Of course, if the software is too little revolutionary, it won't make any sense to use it: The L4 developers already have a Linux 2.6.10 running on top of their microkernel... There ought to be some kind of compromise, basically dropping features when the milestones keep getting pushed back.

Then again, the Hurd might have been just a victim of the Cathedral method it (used to) be developed with...

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

The real power to a microkernel comes from the modularity. It is much easier to maintain several small programs than one large one. Plus, it means that any problem in one of them harms nobody else (and that process can later be restarted instead of bringing the whole system down like Linux would with a bug or faulty driver).

That's one of the big fallacies of the microkernel architecture. It's not easier to maintain the microkernel/server process system than a monolitic kernel. the fact that they are processes rather tan modules doesn't mean they are any more separate. It's, as usual, a tradeoff. Microkernels buy you process separation, which helps you debug null pointers, stale pointers, memory leaks, etc. But it also forces you to use full-blown multithreading on everything, and using message passing on a large scale to do anything simple.

If you've ever looked at the HURD mailing lists (and I have) you'll see that often their bugs are related to messing up the interprocess communication, and to race conditions in general. In contrast, the linux kernel used, for a long time, cooperative multithreading, meaning you could know that you won't get interrupted, no (or very few) global variables could change from under you, requiring less locking, and preventing race conditions. Aditionally, since it's all a single address-space, you can simply call other subsytems, rather than having to serialize a message to be passed through a socket to a certain server, or whatever.

Of course, it's a matter of personal preference, but I'd much rather debug a stray pointer than a race condition. But maybe that's just me.

On top of that you claim that a fault in one driver harms nobody else. Have you ever written network software that has to deal gracefully with other parts of the system going down. Same thing happens on a microkernel. For a subsystem to cope with anything else around it going down, things become a lot more complicated. So again, this makes microkernel systems harder to write.

Plus there is the assumption that the computer will stil lbe useful after parts of the operating system crash. This is the reason why the GUI subsystem of NT 4.0 was brought into the kernel. Sure, the earlier NTs wouldn't go down if the GUI system crashed, but the computer was useless. Therefore the process swapping overhead didn't buy them anything.

Additionally, a lean microkernel can stay resident in CPU cache so all kernel code can be run without memory latency overhead (only memory access and device access causes a problem).

WTF?

And people complain when firefox doesnt come up quickly after it's paged out.

Repeat after me, the kernel doesn't do anything. Specially in a microkernel. It doesn't help that the microkernel can fit into the processor cache if then you have to also keep the socket server and file system server and the web browser in the cache. And this is assuming the CPU cache isn't flushed on every context switch.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[mindriot]

Yes, MacOS X is Mach-based. Mach, however, is not really a microkernel in the true sense of the word. Compared to L4's size, Mach is a huge monster. Somebody else already provided a link to an introductory (if old, from 1996) article by the L4 creator Jochen Liedtke.

would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?

As a matter of fact, the L4KA group is looking into this. See, for example, this thesis currently in progress.

The main benefit is that L4 is actually a true microkernel. It has something like seven system calls that basically handle interprocess communication and address spaces. Everything else needs to be done by user-level processes. L4 separates policy from mechanism, that is, it provides the basic mechanisms and leaves it to the actual OS implementation what policies to implement. It has a very tiny memory footprint and about every optimization possible to operate extremely fast. This is important as in a microkernel environment, much more IPC takes place. Mach sucks here as their IPC operations are terribly slow. L4's IPC speed and its general size show that it's actually feasible to write a real microkernel without taking a non-negligible performance hit. L4Ka::Pistachio is an L4 implementation done completely in C++, which makes code maintenance much nicer, and goes to prove that it is in fact possible to create an efficient microkernel implementation in C++.

It would probably make sense for Apple to look at L4 (as it does for the Hurd), but of course L4 provides much, much less than Mach does (which is good! It's a microkernel after all) and therefore Apple (or, maybe, my friend working on that thesis I mentioned above) would have to reimplement all low-level system services besides address space handling and IPC around L4, in user-level processes. It is probably feasible, but still a long way away.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the speed improvement typically associated with Moore's law (which was acutally about the # of transistors doubling, not speed) has ended. Speed has increased linearly for almost two years now, not exponentially. Based on the previous growth and Moore's law, we should have 10Ghz processors, but we don't even have 4Ghz. Sorry, that assumption is just no longer valid.

There still is a real advantadge in microkernels in that they are designed to be naturally multi-threaded. Since the growth in chips seems to be moving towards parallel computing (e.g. hyperthreading, dual core processors) to make up for the stagnant growth of serial processing (GHz), microkernels may still be useful.

The real advantadge of

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[cpghost]

5% overhead for running a system that has all the features in reliability alone has got to be well worth it.

5% overhead in the system calls only. In their own timeslice, threads run without any performance penalty, up to the point where they need to IPC some server task like a file server or so.

So it depends if your application is more I/O or compute bound.

But you're right: 5% is next to nothing, even on low-end embedded platforms.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[js7a]

My big problem with the Hurd is that there is no attempt to provide real-time support. I'm not asking for a realtime libc or anything like that, just some process scheduling and preemption guarentees for device drivers. Am I wrong that this has been ignored?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[leandrod]

> My big problem with the Hurd is that there is no attempt to provide real-time support

Early optmisation is the root of all sort of evil...

Seriously, I am in no position to know, but wouldn't the multiserver, microkernel design allow for a later realtime version? At least a little bit easier and (or) better than with Linux? And wouldn't focus on microkernel now delay it even more for the server and the desktop?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[js7a]

wouldn't the multiserver, microkernel design allow for a later realtime version?

I hope so. A lot of media applications are going to need that support sooner rather than later.

The trouble with 2nd-generation microkernels is that everything, even e.g., a firewire driver, can get preempted, without a lot of trouble. There should be at least a proposed API for realtime support, even if it's not fleshed out until things are more settled.

From what I can tell by googling mailing lists, the Hurd people just haven't been attending to any kind of decent real time support. That won't satisfy video and embedded applications.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[LWATCDR]

So it does the same thing in a differnt way?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[LWATCDR]

"What the HURD developers should be doing is (risking the wrath of the community) be less revolutionary, and get something going"

But if it is not better why do it?
What is the porpose of herd? To have a GPL'd kernel? Got one and it works pretty well.
Is it to complete RMS's dream of GNU without shareing the spot light with Linus?
Frankly the GNU people should be happy that Linux is out and provides a GPL Unixish Kernel. It gives them time to do something new and exciting.
As to being tedious to port to. Not if you have library level compatablity. Between glibc, GTK, and QT you would cover most of the important software. The ones that would have issues would be Mozilla and OpenOffice.
Yes I have heard of EROS and Plan9 and a few others but none would catch the imagination as much as a real next generation OS from GNU. A Unix succesor not a Unix replacement.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[renoX]

But given the times it takes to develop the Hurd, this also assumes that Moore's "law" is still valid by the time, the Hurd/L4 runs the thing you need..

Jokes aside, I've heard that L4 wasn't suited very well to run on x86-64 due to a lack of segment in x86-64, is-this true?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[andrel]

It is not true that people only use rings 0 and 3 on the x86 architecture. For example, the Xen virtual machine monitor, runs in ring 0, has the the guest OS kernels--e.g. Linux--in ring 1, and leaves ring 3 for userland.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you just hate when you have difficulty in trying to debug the orchestration and multiple message flow between these many programs.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[jacquesm]

I know this will be a 'me too' comment, but I sincerely applaud your point of view.

I think that what is happening is that more and more similar 'unixes' are being built that will all dilute the amount of time spent on these systems in total (assuming it's a zero sum game).

It would be much better to either pool resources or to depart in a radically different direction.

Either way would be progress, in the first case because development for the winning 'contender' would speed up tremendously, in the second case because we'd start building in a new - and possibly revolutionary - direction.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[roie_m]

I think that what is happening is that more and more similar 'unixes' are being built that will all dilute the amount of time spent on these systems in total (assuming it's a zero sum game).

But is it? I don't really think it is. I know this has been said over and over, but many people don't seem to understand: In the eyes of J. Random Kernel-Developer, spending time on developing his own kernel or someone else's is not a choice between equals. In many cases it's a choice between doing something fun and doing work; so really, J. R. K-D will either develop his own kernel or do nothing.

Now, in a company setting, you are pretty much correct: A developer can either spend time on project A or project B, but he won't do nothing (or if he does, fire his ass and hire someone else). But that's not the way things go in the I'm-doing-this-for-fun-on-the-weekend world.

(P.S., no disrespect intended to you, jacquesm, it's just that I see this misconception a lot on /.

P.P.S., J. R. K-D is a male. I know Jane R. K-D exists too, but she's on holiday)

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Xabraxas]

HURD is very different from a traditional UNIX. Just because it has a UNIX interface does not mean it is just another UNIX clone. In fact it will probably be very easy to use another interface if someone decides to implement one considering how seperated the code is, it shouldn't be hard.

Besides if the HURD is made to be completely incompatible with UNIX and Linux then it will be another 20 years just to get some programs written for it. I don't think RMS is going to throw out all the GNU software that is already working to build a different kernel...not after 25 years, especially when 15 years were spent on the kernel itself.

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be interested to know how you would implement context switching in c++.
AFAIK, what they did at Karlsruhe is s/completely/mostly/

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[wtrmute]

The purpose of HURD is to have a GPL'd *microkernel*-based OS. Andy Tanembaum would agree it's a good idea, because driver panics don't bring the kernel down, etc. That's probably the only reason the HURD is still in development. At any rate, even if we allow (merely for the sake of argument) that RMS is a selfish bastard who only wants to shut Linus off the spotlight, there are other people working on the HURD development, and surely not all of them are primarily concerned about making RMS look good. So there must, obviously, be another reason why they work on that kernel.

And about the "if it's worse, then why do it", there are a couple of mantras of F/OSS and the "Unix Way" that state: "Release early, release often" and "It's better to cover 80% of the cases now than 100% later". This means that if people are given something that can do even a little useful work, like run gcc, then other contributors can start making contributions, porting applications, and generally making the system more suited for use. If you get stuck at the mmap() bug and no one can mount a file system, then how are contributors supposed to improve the system? Everything's at a standstill.

Dilbert

[john-gal]

Reminds me of the Dilbert comic strip where an old man waves a piece of paper around and says "At last, I have formed a strategy that is acceptable to all departments. Now if only there were a way to reproduce text from one piece of paper to many."

GNU-Mach was just plain Mach in 1990

[avidday]

Mach was still an active CMU project when the Hurd glacier began its very slow creep from the peaks of lofty idealism towards the throng of onlookers waiting patiently for the free unix kernel they always craved to reach them. I understand there are actually a few brave souls still standing there waiting.....

Like OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

ya know, "fast pane relief for Windows" ... with marketing like that no wonder...

A Major Hurdle is Past!

[VisualPolitics]

Viva la GNU HURD!

Competition is a Good Thing

[Max Romantschuk]

The HURD kernel is often joked about, but I for one does hope that it will eventually become a viable alternative to the Linux kernel. Competition is seldom a bad thing, especially not among free software projects.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[ghoti]

Not sure I agree. It took Linux a long time to be recognized as a viable alternative to other Unices. I don't think this can be easily done again. And I doubt that Hurd would have any noticeable advantages over Linux. It's also free, it runs the same software (99.9% or so ...), and it's a Unix (or, well, Not Unix).

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

For a viable alternative to Linux systems, there is already BSD.

They are both open-source, support many of the same applications, and share some of the same concepts. In fact, for most servers, BSD is a better choice.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[roxtar]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

No, that would be bad. The amount of research going into OS research these days is already very less. The linux kernel itself has a very old monolithic kernel design unlike the mach or L4 which are multilithic. And AFAIK the Linux developers would not be too keen to work with the HURD developers.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[quigonn]

In fact, for most servers, BSD is a better choice.

Could you please back this assertion with facts? The scalability of the BSD systems doesn't really look too good compared with Linux (well, except for NetBSD): http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[Max Romantschuk]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

It's true that combining all the resources and working for The Right Thing is a good idea in theory, but one that fails in practice. The problem is that people can't seem to agree on what The Right Thing is. If they did, there would be no need for politics. For now, I see a need for both competition and politics.

(And the places that have eliminated both are usually called dictator states.)

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux?

Yes sir, I'll reassign the coding monkeys to fit your wishes... wait, what was that? they are volenteering to do this and that's what they want to do? they don't have a boss? well, that's news to me bud, cause I gots a guy right here who wants me to stop the project, yup, stop it right away, cause he wants to tell the coders what they are to do on their own free time. what's that you say? bite your shiny metal ass? well, I never!

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[jeif1k]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new

They are working on something new: a true microkernel. They are making it backwards compatible so that people can easily use it.

Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

But since nobody knows ahead of time which part is the right one, we have to bear that cost. Microsoft and the Soviet Union believed that they were smart enough to predict everything. The Soviet Union also blossomed initially because in the short term, focusing your resources really does make things more efficient. In the long term it didn't work. And you are seeing the same thing beginning to happen with Longhorn at MS.

We need more projects like Hurd: in the long run, only diversity survives.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[jeif1k]

It's good that BSD is out there, but its architecture is close to that of Linux, so it is running into the same limitations. We need more diversity in architectures and approaches when it comes to kernels, and the Hurd provides that.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

My opinion is not based on statistics and the like. It is based on my own experience with the two.

Linux is more user-friendly and considerably easier to use for most people, but BSDs tend to lock their systems down much tighter, by default, than many Linux distros.

Linux 2.6 does aim to provide a remarkable increase in scalability. And that's a good thing. But I, myself, find BSD to be more stable and secure than Linux, at least out of the box.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[hummassa]

Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

In the Free Software world, each developer works in the project he likes to work. People who like to hack L4/Hurd would possibly not like to hack Linux, hence they are not part of the same resource pool.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[jellomizer]

There is success in projects that never make it big. Things are learned new methods are explored. The only problem are people who say to the person "Don't do that like software X, X never made it". There is a lot of good things about Hurd that people can implement into their own OS. It is seeing what the Project Strong Points and see how it compares to yours.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[mjrauhal]

Agreed, at least in this case. If/when Hurd matures enough that it's stable and supports most of the stuff that's important to me, I'll seriously consider a switch due to architectural issues. Yes, I'm in the Tanenbaum camp. :)

Meanwhile, I'm not too vexed about running a Linux kernel. It's certainly not bad, and it is free. As I'm not in too much of a hurry, it isn't a big deal for me that the Hurd is taking its time (though I would of course prefer that some of the huge Linux effort would go towards Hurd instead, but it's not my choice to make).

As a side note, having FUSE or similar integrated into the main Linux kernel and proven to be relatively safe would make me a bit happier with Linux, though, since safe usermode filesystems are the first, though not the only practical level issue for me.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[dAzED1]

people step on each other's toes. If you have Thing X that someone needs to hack on, having 5 other people trying to create the same Thing X accomplishes nothing other than making 4 people have no sense of ownership. Sure, it instills competition between them, but...

In reality, some of the brightest, most talented folk in OSS have personalities that don't quite...umm...lend well to working well with others in certain ways. I can't imagine RMS working on the exact same widget as...well..anyone, for example.

So you end up having the makings for several different teams, since each team can then let folk have their own widgets to work on. Those teams then come up with things like Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Hurd, KDE, Gnome...etc...

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[archen]

work on improving Linux

Actually I find that comment surprising. HURD will be a microkernel, and obviously it will be nothing like the monolitic Linux kernel. Are you going to tell Linux to toss his kernel and make it a microkernel? If you believe that a microkernel is a good idea and you want to see that concept come to fruition, then it is obvious that you WOULDN'T work on Linux, and you would work on Hurd instead. They're both GPL, so if Linux finds something it can use (ego issues aside), I'm sure they'll use it.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[ArsonSmith]

Which outlines the main difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats gain support because they are trying to get everyone to just work on one "Right Thing" ie.. Universal health care, Social Security, Public Schools, etc etc...

Republicans want the competition of the private sector to compete and help push up the best and have the worse die off.

Which idea works the best is up for political debate.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[drinkypoo]

Microkernels aren't actually new. Actually using them for a Unix system might be - I'm not sure to what extent NeXTStep actually used its microkernel, but AFAIK in OSX it's not used for process or memory management, just as an abstraction layer? If I'm wrong, then we already have one. My understanding is that OSX apps run in FreeBSD, which is a (the?) Mach process, and the apps run under that, but that might only be the BSD applications that are handled that way. My understanding of microkernels is that the microkernel services interrupts, manages processes and memory, and interfaces to the hardware, and everything else is a user-space process. This is how the Amiga personal computers behaved, and it definitely provided major benefits in the area of autoconfiguration.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[stoborrobots]

If you believe that a microkernel is a good idea and you want to see that concept come to fruition, then it is obvious that you WOULDN'T work on Linux

Nothing is obvious - those who work on microkernels actively work on linux... and not on HURD!

What this article is about is that the HURD people have ported HURD to L4. But the L4 people had ported Linux to L4 back in 2.2! What's more, linux 2.4 on L4 works, now.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[stoborrobots]

I'll seriously consider a switch due to architectural issues. Yes, I'm in the Tanenbaum camp. :)

So switch now... Efficient Microkernel Linux on x86

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[mjrauhal]

A single-server system on top of a microkernel does not a proper microkernel OS make :)

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[mungtor]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

I agree completely. All these HURD and Linux developers should quit and start working on Solaris 10. Makes perfect sense.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[bonch]

What's that? The project and its followers expect respect, yet any features requests or criticisms are met with sarcastic "we're a volunteer group, damn you" responses?

Oh.

People judge on results. Don't hype something up and then dismiss any criticisms with lame excuses about volunteering. Nobody's forcing them to volunteer--if they don't want to do it anymore, they shouldn't, and people will just use some other kernel if they aren't already.

Basically, I'm tired of the "I'm a hero because I volunteer" attitude in OSS.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[jeif1k]

Microkernels aren't actually new. Actually using them for a Unix system might be

No, Microkernels aren't new. But creating a microkernel that is widely used would be something new, and creating a microkernel that runs Linux executables would be, too.

OS X's kernel probably shouldn't be considered a microkernel at this point (it's been modified too much from the original) The Amiga kernel probably has been the most widely used commercial microkernel to date and a brilliant piece of software.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[drinkypoo]

Let's not forget QNX... :) But I know what you meant.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[dnijaguar]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

I believe it was John Carmack who popularized the idea: "if you are not sure how to do it, do it both ways and then pick the one that works best."

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[Bas_Wijnen]

In fact, L4 does even less. Memory management is mostly done in user space (of course there are some kernel tables which hold information about allocation though), interrupts aren't "serviced" by the kernel, other than sending a message to a user space handler. Interfacing the hardware is also done from user space. The only real thing L4 does is inter process communication (IPC) and thread creation/destruction.

Re:Competition is a Good Thing

[Rysc]

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux?

This is a common question. Why work on PROJECT-A when it's just duplication of effort, why not instead work on PROJECT-B?

The answer to this one is that FOSS developers are not assets which you can assign. You can have X number of people working on Linux and Y number of people working on HURD, or you can have X number of people working on Linux and zero people working on HURD. Which is better? The former. Killing HURD will never give you X+Y number of people working on Linux.

It took Linux a long time to be recognized as a viable alternative to other Unices. I don't think this can be easily done again.

Linux will die soon. Within ten years nobody will run it, probably within five years. What Linux is doing that no one else has been able to do is commoditize the OS kernel. The future most popular operating system will not be Linux, but the end user wont be able to tell. If you take Red Hat, swap out the Linux kernel, and swap in (say) the NetBSD kernel, what has changed? From my mother's perspective, nada. All of her software still runs.

Linux will break the monopoly strangehold on the OS market. Then, because it isn't the perfect solution, it will be marginalized by better kernels and systems... almost all of which will be FOSS and all of which will re-use quickly ported FOSS software.

The people who have to watch out are the driver writers, that's all. All higher-level libraries will be ported as needed to all new systems.

Work on Linux alternatives is not harmful or fruitless. Maybe the HURD will (once, if ever, complete) be so technically superior to anything else that people will switch in droves. Switching will be easy, and few will mourn Linux, just as few mourned modutils when module-init-tools replaced it.

The OS kernel will, in the future, be just a module.

Linux

[mboverload]

Linus provided them a better, simpler kernel so they basicly scrapped HURD for linux, if I remember correctly from "Revolution OS"

BTW, Revolution OS is a great movie, even my non-nerd friends loved it. You can pick it up here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000A9GLO/ revolutionos-20/103-9235316-0475036

Re:Linux

[ABeowulfCluster]

I think the Linux Kernel is actually very complex. If it were a simple Kernel, then my laptop would be able to boot the 2.4 kernel without having to send it -noscsi as a switch to prevent my old laptop from halting during system boot. A lot of device dependent stuff is compiled INTO the kernel for linux. It will be interesting to see what happens when the Cell chips come out.

Re:Linux

[angelfly]

yeah, I saw Rev OS, it wasn't scrapped. They just designed their kernel in a way which is which makes debugging hard, and thus really long development time. Lately it's looking good though from what I've seen in debian hurd

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux was far simpler to get started with because it was an old and proven kernel architecture. So while Linux got to run away with the lion's share of development effort, microkernels have taken a good long time getting their ins and outs fully researched and prototyped. And so now we've ended up with Linux being the far more complex project, with gobs of code for special cases and hardware and whatnot.

It's still entirely possible that with further development L4-Hurd will become the choice for the long run, especially if a lot of the best stuff of the work on Linux - namely device drivers - can be ported over. But it definitely has hefty shoes to fill.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I find your application of the term "simpler" to Linux to be quite mind-boggling. The goal of the Linux kernel developers has certainly never been simplicity; a certain engineering elegance, yes, but a microkernel is by far simpler than anything you'll see in Linux. Just try diving through the driver soup which is Linux some time, and try and make sense out of it in less than three months. They have their reasons, but no, not simpler. Maybe you really mean rudimentary, but that's debatable.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus provided them a better, simpler kernel so they basicly scrapped HURD for linux, if I remember correctly from "Revolution OS"

HURD for Linux?!? Pleeeease tell me you meant to say "HURD for GNU". For once we are actually talking about the two kernels. The GNU system is, and always has been the userland so saying "HURD for Linux" sounds wrong on so many levels. Does it sound right to continue calling it Linux even when there is no Linux kernel left in the system?

Christ, I'm really starting to feel sorry for the GNU project.

Re:Linux

[GigsVT]

Unknot your panties, he meant it like "So you traded your Honda for a Toyota?"

Re:Linux

[Random832]

to "scrap A for B" is to get rid of A in favor of using B instead.

I eagerly await ...

[ABeowulfCluster]

.. the GNU/HERD L4 Live CD so I can see if I like this OS>

Slashdotted ?

[Ray Alloc]

I hope the server is not running on GNU/Hurd, that would not be good for its public image.

Wikipedia link

[ceeam]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family

Re:Wikipedia link

[Anonymous Coward]

you karmawhore slut! :)

AGREECE

[Anonymous Coward]

EN TEE

Re:D'yu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... if GNU/HURD comes out before Longhorn?

...or if GNU/HURD supports more hardware than Longhorn

mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree with the parent poster

Well, it's not that much :)

[Leffe]

Let me quote from the l4-hurd mailing list (posted 02 feb):

At Wed, 02 Feb 2005 01:12:44 -0500,
"B. Douglas Hilton" wrote:
> So, how much longer before Python will build on L4-Hurd? :-)

If you mean "building" as in "compiling it", that should be possible as soon as we ported the dynamic linker, or at least made sure the dynamic linker "builds" (ie, "compiles"), if python can be cross-build.

If you mean "building" as in "compiles _and runs_", then we are talking about a much longer time-frame :)

With my glibc port, I can already build simple applications, but most won't run because they need a filesystem or other gimmicks (like, uhm,
fork and exec), and I only have stubs (dummy functions which always return an error) for that now.

So, for the time being, a measure of progress is what functionality is implemented: drivers, filesystem, signal processing, process
management, etc. Luckily, we have so much existing knowledge to draw from (the Hurd on Mach source code, for example), that I am carefully
optimistic that progress can kick in very quickly once we have sorted out some fundamental (low-level) design issues and got a sufficient
understanding of the details of the system.

Thanks,
Marcus

I might as well quote this too, which I think this story most likely refers to (posted on 27 jan~):

Hi,

with the changes of today, the glibc patch set in CVS supports startup and initialization up to the invocation of the main() function - this means important things like malloc() work.

Of course, there is a lot of cheating going on, and the implementation is full of gaps and stubs. But this step forward means that we can do
easy testing by just writing a program and linking it to glibc, and run it as the "bootstrap filesystem" server.

TLS/TSD seems to work without any problems - important things like the default locale are set up correctly, and thus strerror() works. __thread variables are supported, glibc uses them itself.

There were a couple of fixes and extensions needed in wortel and the startup code, but it wasn't so much. My understanding of the glibc code has reached an all-time high (not that this required much ;)

If you want to reproduce all this, you need to configure, make and install the software as usual. It is important that your compiler can find the installed header files afterwards! Only then you can reconfigure your source with "--enable-libc" and try to build the C library according to the README.

Static linking against this new libc should be possible after (manual) installation, I guess, but I always use a very hackisch and long gcc
command line to cheat myself into a binary that I can then use as "filesystem server" (the last one in the list) in the GRUB configuration. See the README for details.

I think that this basically concludes the first step of the initial bootstrap phase. By being able to link a program against glibc, and
by booting all the way up to that programs main() function, we can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want.

The dinner is prepared! :)

Thanks,
Marcus

This uses a lot of advanced words I have no idea what they could mean though, but I don't mind as long as someone does and writes an article :)

Still a long way to go. Not much one can do except wait... or send in patches if you have kernel hacking experience!

Re:Well, it's not that much :)

[The_Dougster]

Wow, something I wrote actually trickled back into /. Amazing. I was just joking about Python, of course.

L4-Hurd is pretty nifty, I think. Of course I run Gentoo and whatnot personally for the usability aspects, but I've been following the L4-Hurd port for a while now and this is an amazing little bit of news.

I can't wait to start experimenting with the new features. This is really cool.

Here's a coral cache link to the HurdOnL4 Wiki page which I set up last summer. It's slightly out of date, but provides a lot of background behind whats going on and some basic information about the build and boot process.

When you retrieve the CVS sources, read the README and all the docs because they contain the most up-to-date information available about building the system.

Let's see here

[ravenspear]

would it make any sense for Apple to look at L4?

Given the fact that some features in OS X took Apple over 12 years to get into a shipping product (development on Copland started in 89), and given the fact that for years Apple had suffered with a horribly buggy, non standards compliant, limited system that was the Classic Mac OS, and given the fact that Darwin with the Mach kernel is an excellent open source unix system, and given the fact that huge amounts of time and money were spent getting OS 9 and Carbon libraries to run on it, and given the fact that OS X is now arguably the best OS out there and is earning heaps of praise from geeks, luddites, and just about every other type of user, and given the fact that OS X represents the most compelling reason to switch to Apple computers in years, and given the fact that in just a few years the OS has amassed a compartively huge following of developers and applications...

Given all those facts...

Whould it make sense for Apple to now completely rewrite it DOWN TO THE KERNEL LEVEL!!!

I really hope I don't have to answer that.

Re:Let's see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Whould you ever reconsider you're spelling of 'would'?

Re:Let's see here

[jeif1k]

Your enthusiasm is admirable, but let's get back to the facts. Where is the evidence for your assertions of mass-conversions to OS X, for demonstrable superiority of its kernel?

The way it looks to me, Apple has a few percent market share at this point and I haven't seen any evidence that people are switching to it in droves, least of all Linux or UNIX users. And I don't know of anybody who switches to OS X because of the kernel, and it is hard to see what kind of compelling, tangible advantages it has over the Linux kernel.

Re:Let's see here

[tm2b]

Given the fact that some features in OS X took Apple over 12 years to get into a shipping product (development on Copland started in 89).

Copland was abandoned, thank god.

Mac OS X actually was shipping in 1989 - it was just called NeXTStep back then and didn't have Classic. We actually had two NeXTstations in our house back in college in the early 90s, a cube and a slab.

Too bad they had to gussy it up to make it look more like Mac OS 9- to be accepted by the faithful, it was a much more elegant design before that.

Re:Let's see here

[mr_tenor]

My mate's undergrad thesis project was porting Darwin to L4. He got some interesting results too, if I recall correctly.

Re:Let's see here

[ThousandStars]

Arguably, Apple took even longer, since it was looking at next-generation operating systems before Copland development actually started. In addition, NeXT began (IIRC) in 1986.

Also, not only did OS X take a long time to develop, it took an even longer time to become usable. The first desktop version, 10.0, was released in Mar. 2001, and it sucked. Actually, it worse than sucked, it was closer to a beta than a release. I consider it more of a developer's preview. The next version, 10.1, released in Sept or Oct 2001, was usable but still too slow, particularly for the hardware at that time. The first version I would call good, and good enough for the casual user, was Jaguar, 10.2.

Most estimates of the cost of developing OS X in its present are around $1 billion. (Cost of acquiring NeXT was $420M, plus all the development time and money. I think part of the Copland money was counted in there too.) That's a whole lot of development time, money and effort to throw out for a hypothetical, potential and probably minor speed increase. Given the further elaboration above, I agree with the parent's implied answer.

Still, one could argue that much of the time the parent and I count as "working" on OS X didn't really count (i.e. Copland, which failed, and NeXT, much of which didn't make it into OS X), but these timelines were still important in making today's OS X what it is.

Re:Let's see here

[ThousandStars]

Whould you ever reconsider you're spelling of 'would'?

I'm sure he would, if you will reconsider your use of the contraction "you're."

Re:Let's see here

[sp67]

Whoa there, cowboy, hold your horses!

1) OS X has nothing to do with Copland
2) OS X is not based on the Classic Mac OS
3) Classic apps and the Carbon libraries running on OS X do not directly access the Mach microkernel
4) very few things in OS X and its apps actually know there is a Mach microkernel in there

So given all these things, Apple would certainly NOT have to rewrite much if it were to switch microkernels. Hell, even most drivers are written at such a high level that they wouldn't be affected.

So why would't it make sense?

I really hope you answer this.

Re:Let's see here

[Anonymous Coward]

given the fact that OS X represents the most compelling reason to switch to Apple computers in years, and given the fact that in just a few years the OS has amassed a compartively huge following of developers and applications...

Would it make sense for Apple to now completely rewrite it DOWN TO THE KERNEL LEVEL!!!

Palm OS is on its 4th kernel. Did anyone notice? I didn't. I've been a full-time Palm developer for two years, and I couldn't even tell you which version has which kernel (except that I'm pretty sure they switched kernels when they ditched 68k processors for ARM). Did they have to "completely rewrite it down to the kernel level"? Nope, that's just the point: they did the opposite. They left it the same all the way down to the kernel level; it's just the stuff below the kernel level (and a few minor piece above it) that they changed.

The point is, switching out kernels is not necessarily that tough a thing. Sure, it can't be done overnight, but it doesn't force you to rewrite your entire OS.

Much more to the point, if you research it a little, you'll find that Linux has already been ported to L4Ka. And the version of Linux that was ported still runs exactly the same software as regular Linux. If some small team of researchers can port Linux to L4Ka just to give themselves a convenient development platform, then I guess Apple could do the same thing to OS X if they had any interest in doing so.

Re:Let's see here

[Macka]

Depends on what your criteria is. As a server OS for small systems, its on a par with Linux as it shares most of the same apps and has similar features.

For big tin, definitely not because there is no real big tin for it to run on, so it's not got the features (e.g. Virtualization) to compete in that space.

For Super Computing clusters, again its right up there, though whether its any better than Linux in this regard is debatable.

But for the Desktop, yes, it IS the best OS out there. As someone who over the last 12 years has used mwm and CDE over X on various Unix Risc Workstations; Windows 9*/NT/XP; KDE and Gnome on Linux; and Mac OS X for the last 2.5 years, I can vouch for it. No other Desktop + OS experience I've had in my career is as good is Mac OS X is now. And Tiger, later on this year, will raise the bar even higher.

Re:Let's see here

[essreenim]

I use MaC OSX allot in work. Its good - better than Windows, but give me a Debian or Slackware ISO. and...*silence*

Re:Let's see here

[fr0dicus]

Is that silence because you can't configure your soundcard properly?

Re:Let's see here

[Tim C]

Damn, beaten to it. I love it when people correcting the spelling and grammar of other posters make mistakes of their own.

Re:Let's see here

[amightywind]

Whould it make sense for Apple to now completely rewrite it DOWN TO THE KERNEL LEVEL!!!

Sometimes being insanely great requires that you do insane things.

Re:Let's see here

[essreenim]

The silence contentment at not having to fork over any cash to someone for sofware

cha-ching

Re:Let's see here

[LWATCDR]

The question then becomes... Why?
After the port would OS/X be, faster, more stable, more secure, or more portable?
I would bet it could be done. The bigger questions is should it be done.

Re:Let's see here

[ravenspear]

1) OS X has nothing to do with Copland

I never said it did. Copland was Apple's initial attempt to make an OS with many of the features OS X has today. Obviously it was a miserable failure. But the fact remains that it was 12 years from the time they started developing those features in Copland until the time they actually had a shipping product that utiized them (OS X in 2001). That is what I was saying.

2) OS X is not based on the Classic Mac OS

I never said it was. I was merely comparing different aspects between the two systems.

3) Classic apps and the Carbon libraries running on OS X do not directly access the Mach microkernel
4) very few things in OS X and its apps actually know there is a Mach microkernel in there

Why do you think this is? It's because Apple wrote a large amount of system code to hook its existing APIs up to the lower level components.

So why would't it make sense?

Because it is needlessly reinventing the wheel, or because "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" or because of a dozen other reasons. Take your pick.

Re:Let's see here

[CAIMLAS]

I get the feeling that HURD is going to end up being to operating systems what Enlightenment is to window managers: every time it starts to look promising for non-development use, it's scrapped for a rewrite and all the functionality is detroyed due to redesign of the lower-level stuff.

Re:Let's see here

[diamondsw]

While the Copland project was an abysmal failure that left Apple rudderless for 5 crucial years, let's not forget that NeXTStep was a perfectly finished operating system and doing its work, as was System 7 up until 1992. So, yes, Apple knew for a damn long time this was needed, and yes, it took a long time to get there, but it wasn't all wasted effort. In the meantime, they did develop a lot of good technology for Copland that made it into classic Mac OS in 8 and 9. The NeXTStep acquisition and Blue Box/Classic idea made up for the horrible architecture mistakes in Copland.

As for OS X being usable, yeah, that took a while. I'd personally argue that 10.1 was usable - all of the major features were in place and speed was "acceptable", but by no means fast. I've been impressed how much extra speed Apple has managed to wring from OS X with a combination of aggressive caching and parallelism (think the boot process).

Finally, as someone who used the various developer releases as they came out, it's really amazing the amount of work that went into OS X as it morphed from NeXT to Rhapsody to OS X. While a lot of the API's stayed the same, things like major kernel/driver/IO systems were completely redone, the whole BSD layer was updated, Carbon was developed, the display model was tossed out and redone, etc. A HUGE amount of effort that really is impressive.

Re:Let's see here

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple ever got serious about larger servers, they would may need to make some significant changes. However, as long as their entire market is small systems where I/O perf is not critical, you're right, there's no real need.

Re:Let's see here

[mrchaotica]

OS X is a lot more than just Mach; I realize that switching out the microkernel is not trivial, but surely the vast majority of the OS (everything other than the kernel) would be able to transfer with few changes, wouldn't it? Considering that, I find it hard to believe that switching to L4 would mean "throwing out the entire OS."

By the way, other than the right-click-for-menu and gray boxy look, what didn't make it into OS X from NeXTStep?

Re:Let's see here

[squiggleslash]

Copland development started in 1994. The project was initiated because Apple went into a panic about Windows 95, whose release was imminent. I suspect the 1999 year you quote is confusion with Taligent. Taligent was spun off and released three or so years after it was initiated and it did ship, but it bombed. Had Microsoft not been developing a pre-emptive multitasking 32 bit version of DOS/Windows and hadn't been developing NT, it's unlikely Copland would have happened.

Mac OS X is not Copland. Copland was cancelled after a couple of years of development, and NeXT bought to replace it. OS X is, essentially, the latest version of NEXTSTEP.

"Aha!", I pretend to hear you cry, "But it took until 2003 before there was a viable version of OS X!". Well, that's not true either. Within a year or so of the takeover, Apple released, internally and to developers, Rhapsody, the first NEXTSTEP-MacOS combination operating system. This was, by all accounts, excellent, and the second release of it had most of the functionality we associate with OS X today. However, while this was a complete operating system, Apple decided there were two problems with it: it didn't feel right, they wanted the operating system to feel more revolutionary, and developers weren't happy, they felt they needed APIs compatable with the older platform to help them port their application.

The result is this working, fully functional, many people would have killed to get it, operating system was kept off consumer machines, essentially, until Apple felt they had something more revolutionary. That's not to say you couldn't buy it, sometime after Rhapsody was released, the first "commercial" release happened in the form of "Mac OS Server." I can't remember, for the life of me, the year that came out, but I believe it was prior to 2000.

In short, when Apple had a right design, they did have working products in a reasonable space of time, they just felt they didn't have commercially successful products, and avoided selling them (hard) for that reason. But they've been releasing or selling OPENSTEP based operating systems, in some shape or form, for much longer than most people realise.

The project from 1994, Copland, failed because, well, it probably wasn't the right design, and it certainly wasn't managed properly. Everyone makes mistakes.

I don't this is really comparable to the HURD. The HURD has suffered delay after delay, but much of this is because of Linux. The fact Linux exists means a free operating system based on GNU running over Linux, can exist, and the pressure is off of HURD. HURD, therefore, can be a test bed, with the aim towards making it a perfect kernel.

I honestly believe that if it wasn't for Linux, we'd probably have had HURD 1.0 appear over a decade ago.

Re:Let's see here

[squiggleslash]

The original poster's dates were off. Apple started looking at next generation operating systems in 1989, Copland started in 1994. So the comment "it was looking at next-generation operating systems before Copland development actually started." is true but the first half of your sentence is thus undermined by the GP's dates.

What Apple started in 1989 was Taligent, which was released a few years later after being spun off.

So we have NextStep, started in 1987 or so, which was successfully released within a couple of years. Taligent, started in 1989, which shipped within about four years of development. Copland, which was badly managed and arguably not the right design, which was cancelled after two years.

And then OS X, the first version of which was called Rhapsody and released to developers within a year or so of the NeXT/Apple merger. It then took several releases (Rhapsody DR2, Mac OS Server, Mac OS X Preview) before Apple felt they had something they could market as a consumer level operating system. But before that, it certainly was a full blown powerful usable operating system, it just was too un-Maclike and unrevolutionary to fit into their marketing strategy.

I think, in short, the GP was off-base. I agree with you the first versions of the consumer level operating system "OS X" weren't terribly good, but that's a whole different discussion. NEXTSTEP through Mac OS Server were, by all accounts, very nice and very usable. It was just Aqua changed everything.

Re:Let's see here

[squiggleslash]

I guess there's Display Postscript. Apple didn't want to pay Adobe royalties so they replaced the technology with Quartz. There's also a lot of stuff that was replaced in a more strict sense (eg old, not Mac-like, stuff replaced with new stuff that was more Mac like and a little nicer, rather than the removal of a technology) - the Workspace Manager (the NeXT equivalent of the Finder or Microsoft's Explorer) was replaced with something resembling the Finder (thank goodness, NeXT people may disagree but I've always thought it was abysmal), for example. The old dock was replaced with something that performs additional functions and has a different kind of look to it.

I think rewriting OS X to run over L4 would be possible but not as trivial as some people are arguing. You could probably modify Linux, if you really wanted, swapping out XNU and the Mach-tied device drivers and putting in the modified Linux and user-space module management tools to support it. However, would you want to?

OS X's kernel does exactly what Apple wants it to do. Unless there's a compelling reason to switch, Apple would be undermining much of the development and testing work its done so far for what'd amount to a largely academic exercise.

And don't encourage them too much: As Mac OS X is a proprietary operating system, they might even have better choices available than L4. For example, if they could consider replacing Mach with L4, why not replace Darwin with QNX?

Re:Let's see here

[mrchaotica]

Quartz is "Display PDF" -- it's not the same as Display Postscript, but it's not all that different either. Also, are you sure you have to pay royalties to Adobe to use Display Postscript? How does GNUStep work around that, then?

As for the Dock, it seems to me that they just glued the two pieces together, moved it around, and made it transparent. Other than eye-candy (the icon scaling and whatnot), what additional functions does it perform?

The file-viewing part of the Finder really is different from the NeXTStep file manager (thank goodness!), but the window manager part is still similar. They took out the virtual desktops, added a "close" button to the title bar, moved the application menu from the right mouse button to a bar at the top of the screen, and made pretty graphics.

So anyway, sure, they "replaced" the NeXT look-and-feel with the Mac look-and-feel. But that doesn't mean they threw out big chunks of the OS! They just wrote a theming engine for it (more or less). The real work was all in adding stuff (like Quicktime, Applescript support, the Classic environment, etc.) to the NeXTStep foundation; not replacing it.

Re:Let's see here

[squiggleslash]

Quartz is "Display PDF"

I used to say that too and then was corrected by an actual Apple engineer. As I understand it, while the designers of Quartz used PDF as its model, it's not "Display PDF" in the same way as "Display Postscript" is related to PostScript. You don't write PDF, you make relatively mainstream looking API calls in the same way as you would Win16, Quickdraw, X11, or graphics.library.

Also, are you sure you have to pay royalties to Adobe to use Display Postscript? How does GNUStep work around that, then?

GNUStep doesn't use Display Postscript. (In fact, GNUStep doesn't use any DPS type system to the same degree of intensity that NextStep does, when NextStep used DPS, GNUStep, for the most part, uses an abstraction that ultimately goes straight to X11 bypassing DPS type stuff completely.) What GNUStep includes is Display Ghostscript, a complete rewrite that's compatable but doesn't contain Adobe code.

That's what Apple had and didn't want to use. Their options were: 1. Continue to license DPS from Adobe. 2. Write their own clone of DPS (or license such a thing.) or 3. Write something they considered more efficient and appropriate that could be done in less time. They chose 3.

As for the Dock, it seems to me that they just glued the two pieces together, moved it around, and made it transparent. Other than eye-candy (the icon scaling and whatnot), what additional functions does it perform?

They're pretty dissimilar beyond the "I can launch tasks and switch to launched tasks" thing of the original. You can minimise windows, navigate entire directory trees, and attach documents, to this dock, none of which could be done with the NeXT version. The NeXT version only showed certain apps, not all running apps (they appeared as icons on the bottom of the screen instead of in the dock, to dock them - indeed - you'd drag them to the dock.) You can get a good feel of what the old NeXT version did by running WindowMaker.

The file-viewing part of the Finder really is different from the NeXTStep file manager (thank goodness!), but the window manager part is still similar. They took out the virtual desktops, added a "close" button to the title bar, moved the application menu from the right mouse button to a bar at the top of the screen, and made pretty graphics.

I don't recall NeXT having virtual desktops. Close buttons were always on the title bars (the new buttons are the "change size" button (yellow) and the pill on the right that hides and shows toolbars, amongst other things.) Window management is similar (click on an app icon - of course, they're all in the dock now - and all of the windows come to the front, and you can hide apps, but beyond that everything NeXT did was being done by everyone anyway.)

But that doesn't mean they threw out big chunks of the OS!

I think Display Postscript is the biggie. I do think that people who talk about this tend to exaggerate on both sides - there are those who are convinced that OS X has little in common with NeXT, and those who think it's just a themed NeXTStep with a bit added. It's neither, of course. The UI, for all intents and purposes, is entirely different. But behind it, NeXT programmers find it familiar, the command line is familiar, and there's a Services menu...

Porting applications

[gtoomey]

When I see X, KDE, & Postgres ported to Hurd then I'll believe it.

Re:Porting applications

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop runs X on Hurd!
[No, really I'm serious]

Re:Porting applications

[Junichiro Koizumi]

Maybe they should start with something a little simpler, like init or something.

Re:Porting applications

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm. Hurd runs all three of those, and has done for a while (X since 1999). Debian/Hurd has about half of the packages that are in plain Debian.

But then I should have expected a cheap uninformed jibe like that on Slashdot.

Great

[Pan T. Hose]

When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security features, which have already been implemented in the 1970s, only better and with no strings attached. Those TCPA zealots are usually completely ignorant of the existance of such operating systems as KeyKOS or EROS with formal proofs of correctness without all of the silliness.) Are there any plans to have a real capability-based security model available in the Hurd?

Re:Great

[CAIMLAS]

It'd have been nice to have them try and impliment an Open "OpenVMS" type OS, as that was more the direction they were going anyway... We've got OSS POSIX, but no VMS. :-/ That would be incredible, IMO.

Re:Great

[Bas_Wijnen]

Yes. The Hurd-on-L4 bases all its communication on a capability system. Programs running on it may or may not explicitly make use of it (it's all wrapped for the POSIX interface, so they obviously don't see it), but they will use it underneath anyway.

A good thing about this is of course that things like chroot are very easily implemented (there are many more good things, as I'm sure you know), but there is one problem: Any program which uses it is not portable to other systems. That means most programs will not want to use it. Which is a pity, of course, as it is a great system.

"hello, world" anytime soon ?

[anti-NAT]

How much time would it take to port it over ?

Re:"hello, world" anytime soon ?

[Tumbleweed]

Dude, that's "GNU/Hello World," if you please.

Re:"hello, world" anytime soon ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. And with a 380k tarball, it might actually take some work to port it.

Ok, I know you're only allowed one joke, but ...

[ggvaidya]

FIRST CODE! :D

(kudos to everybody working on this. think of how long mozilla took to "come out" - and the impact it had!)

In the words of Linus...

[tod_miller]

I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)

Courtesy of Gooooooogle

The thing is, GNU/HURD will still be... Linux. Don't shout, yes I know, the thing is, people call Linux, Linux.

Then people say, aaahaaaa Mr Bond... it is really GNU/Linux.

Well I am not so sure anymore. Debian think so, but why not call it GNU/Gimp/OOo/Java/Perl/apache/*all other installed apps*/Linux.

Is GNU software is great, and calling Linux+GNU 'Linux' is wrong, but calling any installation of the Linux kernel 'Linux' is correct regardless of other software.

If I call my OS Linux, I do so without reffering to the installed user space apps, however necessary they might be.

I think the person who is most keen to see HURD is Linus himself! After all, he has been waiting since 1990!

I do hope that /. in 2006 doesn't have a new flame topic:

HURD v Linux (and HURD will never sell with that name - IMHO)

HURD running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel first booted in 1994 and became GNU's official kernel

The development of the GNU/Hurd has important emotional and practical value to GNU fans because in 1990s GNU had not completed any kernel and used the Linux kernel out of necessity. Thus, a number of GNU fans feel that they will have "pure GNU" only with the Hurd kernel.

I do think that some of the GNU ramblings are a bit ungrateful to Linux kernel. Without Linux it would be in 5 years that people would wake up to *nix OS's types, and in 5 years we would be where we were in 1994.

I see one thing, with the FUD over linux, will the same FUD establish itself over the huge sprawling software base of GNU?

Will GNUimp get sued by Adobe? How will this GNUism evolve?

And the final question on every /. lips is, in regard to anything, when will HURD run Linux? ;-)

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Anonymous Coward]

That post is a joke, right?

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who modded this insightful? Report to the nearest editor and turn in you modding license.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[m50d]

You're right on the name. The FSF should have gone for alix, just for the coolness factor. Just compare "Hey, I run linux, you? Alix myself" with "Hey, I run linux, you? Hurd myself". Just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Sonicated]

And the final question on every /. lips is, in regard to anything, when will HURD run Linux? ;-)


It already does: l4linux.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Ohreally_factor]

I do hope that /. in 2006 doesn't have a new flame topic:

HURD v Linux

Let me be the first to post the Kottke/HURD troll.

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you HURD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. Then it hit me. This doesn't even have a files system yet. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running Gentoo, which by all standards should be a lot slower than HURD, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, FireFox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even VIM is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on HURD, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a HURD that has run faster than its Linux counterpart, despite the HURD's' micro kernel architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3.5 Ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that L4 is a superior kernel.

HURD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use HURD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[The_Dougster]

You're right on the name. The FSF should have gone for alix, just for the coolness factor. Just compare "Hey, I run linux, you? Alix myself" with "Hey, I run linux, you? Hurd myself". Just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Well, if you want to be trendy, then you just call it "NewOS" or "New" as a play on GNU's "guh-nu". Compare:

• This computer runs the "guh-nu" hurd.
• This computer runs the "New" operating system.

Obviously, one uses "New" to impress the layman, while reserving "guh-nu hurd" for the elite inner circle of fellow computer nerds, where speaking it out aloud is sure to provide much amusement.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Anonymous Coward]

> HURD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to
>use HURD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems

faster: You're not running DOS, are you? DOS is faster than any multitasking OS.

cheaper: The Hurd will be downloadable at no cost, like Linux is.

more stable: The Hurd will not be brought down by a flakey modem driver, or any crashing driver.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Kiryat Malachi]

Good lord.

He *announced* it was a troll post, and you still got suckered?

Go hide your face in shame.

Re:In the words of Linus...

[zsau]

Ummm... don't be silly. When you install Firefox onto Windows, it doesn't suddenly become Mozilla/Windows, does it? No! So why should user apps be counted towards the name? GNU/Linux refers to code which provide significant GNU tools to a Unix-like operating environment running on a Linux kernel, such as Glibc, init, binutils etc. etc. A Unix-like operating envirnoment running on a Linux kernel that uses BSD libc, init, binutils equivalents, however, would not be cassed GNU/Linux, even if it ran bash and Gnome.

I walked to my system...

[CliffH]

... to see what headline was up and I see that Hurd has ran its first app. What's the next headline going to be, "Duke Nukem Forever Net Test released to public"? :) Yes, it's flamebait. Yes, it's a troll. Like most people on here though, I wish them all very good luck and I look forward to the day I actually do get to run Hurd on a few systems.

Linux is dying...

[tabkey12]

Netcraft confirms

I, for one, welcome our new L4 overlords!

Re:Linux is dying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could we please stop modding every single 'I, for one...' joke up.

It got tiresome weeks ago.

Re:Linux is dying...

[MysteriousPreacher]

Weeks ago? Try months.

hurd/linux ?

[kentaromiura]

the GNU project want to provide a free OS, for this they build GCC and emacs to write a kernel(Hurd) i think that software, that can be compiled with GNU Gcc compiler would run on this kernel (on the contrary i must laught) so now we can a "Linux Software Gcc"-based O.S. with Gnu/Hurd-L4 kernel.. this sounds good..

Re:hurd/linux ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Is your brain usually this confused or do you have to take a lot of hard drugs first?

Well worth the wait ...

[SuperDuG]

... Maybe now Stallman will leave linux alone!!

I mean the whole useing linux thing was only temporary ... right?

Wait, why are we wanting to call it GNU/Linux still?

Don't like it, go play with your own OS!!

The entire idea of HURD, while wonderful in theory is a waste of time, and the project hasn't been set back by years because of anything other than LINUX ALREADY WORKS.

I mean I am not one to stifle innovation, but HURD will never ever be where Linux is, because no one except slashdot and Stallman care.

I guess I'm just a flamebaiting troll, but as if you'd expect anything less from a story about HURD.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Mark_MF-WN]

HURD will never ever be where Linux is...

By that logic, no one should ever start a new software project that isn't already being met (however inadequately) by some other piece of software. Why did Linus start writing Gnu/Linux, when there were already great operating systems like Windows/Dos, and Unix/Unix?

Fankly, I think it's a great thing that BSD and HURD will be putting some pressure on Linux to be the best. Competition makes them strong, and the cross-fertilization of ideas makes them stronger still.

Besides, HURD may end up being superior to Linux in some domains, such as high-reliability systems (think banking servers), driver development, OS research, shared systems, and the like.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[m50d]

Linux doesn't work that well. No, hear me out. The design isn't very good, and it's starting to show. The fact that you need to be root to mount things, and the trouble with reiser4, are showing the flaws in the VFS layer. The confusion over what belongs in the SCSI subsystem, with atapi cd drives being moved out of it because linus doesn't like them there but everything else being rapidly moved in there, betrays deeper problems - I have been told that the scsi subsystem should be used for everything, but since the IDE one was put together first for linus' cheap hardware, ide uses that. And yet some things are being moved into the ide subsystem, and the scsi one is not as nice as it could be if it was moved up a layer where it seems to belong. This is because linux wasn't properly designed. It was always meant to be a temporary kludge, something to work until a proper replacement came along. So some design decisions were badly made from a long term point of view, and some weren't made at all, just sort of emerged as an imperfect compromise. The problems are becoming more and more evident, and it's getting to the stage where we need a replacement.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Anonymous Coward]

and we should listen to you because . . . ?

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[808140]

Why did Linus start writing Gnu/Linux ...

I'm sure RMS appreciates your nod to him, but he actually doesn't want you to just randomly put GNU/ in front of every instance of Linux. In this case, you should actually just say Linux (and RMS would agree with me), because you aren't talking about GNU/Linux the OS, but Linux the kernel (which Linus wrote, or at least began). Linus did not write GNU/Linux -- most of that OS was written by other people, with most of the userland tools and libraries that make it function coming from the GNU project (hence the GNU/ monicker).

The GNU/Linux / Linux distinction is actually useful, because the OS and the kernel are distinctly different things. I usually just say Linux when it's clear which one I mean, but even if you don't appreciate RMS's point of view, you should understand that a kernel and an operating system are not the same thing.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[hackstraw]

Why did Linus start writing Gnu/Linux, when there were already great operating systems like Windows/Dos, and Unix/Unix?

Linus did not believe that Windows/DOS was great.

And at the time the only UNIX like thing that worked on x86 hardware was Xenix (I believe) so he posted a USENET message and Linux was born.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Mark_MF-WN]

I actually just included the Gnu/Linux for the comedic purpose of contrasting it with Windows/Dos (Windows 3.1 running on the DOS "kernel"), and Unix/Unix (Unix running on the Unix kernel).

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Anonymous Coward]

We didn't need to call it GNU/Linux after tcc was capable of compiling the linux kernel. That is, if you assume that it was supposed to be called GNU/Linux because GNU provided the kernel compiler, the userland c library and the linker daemon (as well as some other binutils and textutils). The only thing missing now is an 'ld' written by someone else and we're free. You could set up a system with a linux kernel, tcc, tcsh, X, kde, mozilla and you wouldn't have a FSF-piece of software on your machine. And it would work.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[m50d]

Because I'm right. Don't believe it just because I've said it, but look at my arguments. Look at the kerfuffle in the layers I've mentioned, and see if you think it's real. See if you think it matters. See if you think it's symptomatic of a problem with Linux. I think it is, and I think anyone who looks at it objectively will see that it is. But by all means don't just take my word for it.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[adavies42]

So why isn't the US bringing democracy to Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Nepal, or North Korea?

All in due time....

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[FreeUser]

HURD will never ever be where Linux is...

By that logic, no one should ever start a new software project that isn't already being met (however inadequately) by some other piece of software. Why did Linus start writing Gnu/Linux, when there were already great operating systems like Windows/Dos, and Unix/Unix?

Fankly, I think it's a great thing that BSD and HURD will be putting some pressure on Linux to be the best. Competition makes them strong, and the cross-fertilization of ideas makes them stronger still.

I couldn't agree more. I've been a fan and ardent user of Linux since the 0.49 days (1993), and I find FreeBSD and HURD developments exciting and, frankly, important. Not just because it puts a little friendly pressure on the Linux developers, but because diversity is good.

Take for example the licensing issues Linux could have if the developers find themselves needing to move to Version 3.0 of the GPL (this may not happen, and I certainly hope software patents and the like never force such a move, but you never know, and given the current climate, a migration to an updated license may well be required, at least in the US). If Linux were to ever become mired in a untenable license and unable to get unanimous agreement to update said license, we'll still have FreeBSD on one side and an FSF-compliantly GPLed HURD on the other.

This isn't likely (and I really hope it never happens and people can accuse me of wearing a ten-gallon tinfoil hat), but regardless, having a third viable kernel for running free software and all the GNU stuff will be a wonderful thing. As you say, at the very least it will be optimal for certain niches, and if it does turn out to be really superior to the existing monolithic kernels, it could well replace Linux as the defacto standard down the road. I'm not sure that's terribly likely either, but you never know, and having the option available to the community is a tremendously good thing, whether we choose to migrate because of litigation/licensing issues, technical issues, a combination of the two, or not at all (and it remains a niche product).

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Mark_MF-WN]

Yeah, right. It'll never happen, except for maybe Iran -- and even then, only if they fail to complete their nuclear weapons program promptly enough.

Saudi Arabia is already a puppet, Nepal is too inconsequential to merit American's attention, and NKorea and China are too strong.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[CAIMLAS]

(I'm not this post's grandparent, btw)

What you say makes sense to me. I've not really thought about it much before, but after reading your post I started thinking about how devices are used and referred to, what you said is pretty clear.

I wouldn't necessarily agree that it's all that terribly "broken" but I do agree that some more thought should probably be put into redesigning the different device chains, based on my (limited) knowledge of how they work. Maybe simply have a universal chain which any device can use, and then have modularity to it so any bus type could use it.

But I digress, that's not very monolithic, now is it. :P It does seem to be the best, most efficient way to do it, though. Things like CF/IDE/PCMCIA/USB interaction is all quite a bit kludged at the moment. The CF card -> USB -> cardbus/yenta_socket ordeal springs to mind in addition to your comment on SCSI IDE emulation...

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Anonymous Coward]

or you could just use bsd.

Re:Well worth the wait ...

[Bas_Wijnen]

Linus did not write GNU/Linux -- most of that OS was written by other people, with most of the userland tools and libraries that make it function coming from the GNU project (hence the GNU/ monicker).

In fact, the system should be called GNU even if the FSF didn't write a single line of code.

If I put something together out of blocks, none of which I made, I still get to choose the name for my creation. Then if someone exchanges one block for something he made himself, that doesn't change the name of the creation (unless it was significantly changing it, so the original is not recognisable).

This is very much what happened. The FSF put a system together and gave it a name. They even wrote a substatial amount of code to get the system working, but that doesn't really matter. Linus wrote a kernel and plugged it in (with quite some help from the FSF, btw, as it is not a trivial thing to do).

For historical reasons people call the whole system Linux, not GNU. RMS is quite right to say "I made the system, I get to choose the name". The name is GNU. Only for PR reasons or clarity could you consider calling it GNU/Linux, or "a Linux-based GNU system".

choose a new name for a new kernel

[jeif1k]

A commercial company might take old code, given it a new name, and shipped it as a brand new thing. But GNU starts a brand-new, hot project based on better microkernel architecture and they use for it a name that people already associate with failure.

The L4Ka-based kernel is a new project that sounds like it has a lot of promise and may address problems that both Linux and commercial kernels have with modularity and extensibility. This new kernel should get a snazzy new name to get that message across.

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole idea of the gnu philosophy is to fuck your snazzy names and to judge the product by its own merits

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's not the "whole idea". The whole idea of the GNU philosophy is to create free software.

Creating free software doesn't mean that you have to market or name it poorly. In fact, the GNU project has generally been pretty good at naming and selling its ideas.

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[Tumbleweed]

The L4Ka-based kernel is a new project that sounds like it has a lot of promise

I don't think something called "El Forka" sounds all that inspiring.

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[sleepingsquirrel]

How about Tunes?

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[forkazoo]

You got a problem with forks? I'll poke you, man!

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[Tumbleweed]

Bring it on, four-tines! :)

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[MarkRose]

That was the funniest thing I read all week! Thank you! :D

Dilbert == BSA whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the Dilbert comic strip ...

I've been boycotting Dilbert since its authors became BSA propaganda whores.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Ouch, that's really disappointing. That should be more widely publicized; perhaps a slashdot story?

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[dustmite]

Indeed, ouch, I find that very disappointing, I'll join the "Dilbert boycott". How patronising too, their lame psychological manipulation strategy: "As an engineer like you ..." .. isn't that how you try manipulate 6-year olds? The BSA's tactics disgust me in general.

I used to like Dilbert, but I cannot stand any comic strip that whores itself out to corporate interests in this way. A comic strip is not an advertising platform.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[HuguesT]

Please think it through, Dilbert is right. How can you not support the BSA's actions ?

The BSA is making sure copyrights are respected (i.e. the law). Now the only way we are going to get reasonable copyright laws is when people realize that current terms are unacceptable. If people think that they can get away with copyright infringement they wont put as much effort into voicing their opinion regarding how much they think current laws sucks.

In other words people are now saying: "yes, copyright sucks but it doesn't affect me, I can get all the software/music/videos I want (not need) through [P2P du jour], and I can get away scott-free".

Moreover the BSA supports Linux. Yes it does.

It is when companies and individuals realize how much money their have to give to BSA members like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others and what little return they get that they'll take a long hard look at Linux and all the excellent Free applications out there.

There is no need for a vast majority of people to give their money to run Windows or Photoshop. They can get all the software they need and more and stay on the right side of the law.

The GPL, BSD license and the like all use the underlying copyright laws. If copyright laws are not enforced then those licenses are worthless as well.

Dilbert is supporting the BSA and so should you. The worse the BSA treats the consumer, the more strongarmed its tactics are, the more audits it conducts, the better for Free software.

Unless you think you have a right to freely access all the copyrighted works in the world?

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the aims of the BSA contain the seeds of their own destruction it will take a long time for that to come about. In the meantime we will suffer erosion of actual use rights of materials we have purchased or licensed, see the creation of an installed base of DRM that cannot legally be reverse engineered and will be costly to replace (lack of interoperability make staged upgrades very difficult), allow private companies to usurp enforcement rights from the FBI (as they are split between ordinary crime and counter-terrorism), and give increased IP rights the weight of tradition.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[eclectro]

Me three. Scott Adams of all people should be in touch enough with his nerd readership to realize that none of us would take kindly to that kind of sellout.

The only thing that comes to mind is that it must have been some serious chunk o' change that led to this. Maybe he thought that his strip had jumped the shark and he was going to grab what he could before the bottom falls out, ala Garfield.

In any case I'm sorry to see it.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[mwvdlee]

Remember Novell's legal actions against the BSA?

BSA protects the rights of their members, they just protect the rights of some members more than those of other members.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[john-gal]

Maybe Scott Adams is not as brave as Bill Waterson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Watterson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[dustmite]

Although GP has a point, forcing people to pay for software would encourage adoption of cheaper alternatives for now, you are right, this is the real danger: an installed base of DRM. Companies like Microsoft currently charge "monopoly prices", which are "what the market will bare". They aren't so stupid as to charge so much that people are forced to look at alternatives. So when the first "major" round of DRM comes, people will just accept it, rationalising the decision by saying "well, it doesn't cost THAT much more" and "at least we're doing things the legal way". That's 'fine and well', but once DRM-based PCs and OSs become widespread, the fundamental platform has changed, and the 'big cartels' will be able to (and WILL definitely) engage in highly anti-competitive behaviour by using their newfound massive control over the platform to lock out potential new competitors. This isn't tinfoil-hat, it's logical and inevitable and is the current direction things are moving - fast. And people will anyway also be locked in for the same reasons they are already "locked in" today (e.g. "everyone uses MS Word and we need to interchange files"), only it'll be worse.

If we can encourage enough adoption of alternatives, e.g. Linux, hardware manufacturers may still be "forced" to produce non-DRM hardware, but this seems unlikely. Most of the world is already hooked on Microsoft's 'heroin'.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[essreenim]

Ok, no more Dilbert for me, but Fuzzy logic (bbspot) Ever read? THat corporized too?

I would be very disappointed..

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[StormyWeather]

Dry up. If your company is breaking the law it should be punished. I've read stories of schools switching to linux because of being jacked up by the BSA. BSA isn't linux's friend, but it's a not an unuseful tool. It's much like tricking one bully to beat up the bully that has been stealing your lunch money.

Also to the person that is crying about the cartoonist believing that downsizing is good. After being purchased by a bloated company, I do too. The company I worked for was small, fast, and mean till it got bought out by a huge conglomerate. Now everyone spends all day in meetings instead of programming, there is no good direction, and hell they can't even get the toilet paper replaced in a timeful manner. It sucks that when we got purchased they made a few cuts at our company where they didn't need to be made, and left some of the deadweight laying around, but that's just part of the problem of being bloated in the first place. At a certain point your so fat you don't know where the fat ends and the meat begins.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Colonel Cholling]

Maybe Scott Adams is not as brave as Bill Waterson.

Come on. If Waterson had balls, he'd be taking a crowbar to the windshield of every El Camino with a sticker of Calvin pissing on a Ford logo.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Spoing]

1. I've been boycotting Dilbert since its authors became BSA propaganda whores.

What in your link is objectionable? I don't get it...seems like the text is spot on to me. (insert comments from other links showing that this actually supports Linux et. al)

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[MikeBabcock]

Last I checked, Dilbert wasn't written by an engineer. Maybe P.Eng. or two should point this out to Mr. Adams? IIRC, he's just a vegan with his own line of food and a good idea for making fun of the techies that used to be around him at work.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[stromthurman]

Not that this is even remotely on topic now, but...
It is possible that Adams has little or no control over this sort of thing. I remember Bill Waterson being really upset with how the Syndicate made use of "Calvin" (pissing on various car emblems and so forth.) In fact, if you look at the BSAEngineers page, and read the copyright notice at the bottom, Adams isn't even mentioned.
"DILBERT©United Feature Syndicate, Inc"

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

The parent is right on target. I'm surprised that so few slashdotters realize the facts he lays out.

Of course, I think many slashdotters believe they are simply entitled to freely access all copyrighted works... This is an anarchistic twist on the FSF's notion that software patents are morally wrong.

The parent wisely points out that simply by letting the current system be enforced, the beneftits of alternative licenses will begin to be clear to everyone.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[ProfitElijah]

> Please think it through, Dilbert is right. How can you not support the BSA's actions ?>/tt>

Easily. I support its basic principles - protecting its memebers' copyrights - but its actions are indefensible. Take some of the following examples. In 2003 they sent a letter to a German university demanding they take down infringing software from their site. The software? OpenOffice. Also in 2003 it attacked Massachusetts, the only state holding out against the DoJ's settlement, for adopting an open source policy when no such policy existed. In 2000 when I was working for a small company in London, we received a letter threatening to make us "the focus of a BSA investigation" if we didn't get licenses for all the pirated software in use at our offices. We had licenses for all our proprietary software - namely Informix and Solaris. In 2002 they attempted to raid kickme.to's offices in order to find information about their customers, when kickme.to is just a redirection service with no hosted content of its own. Only last month they published a whitepaper calling for the enforced cooperation of 3rd parties (i.e. ISPs) with rights holders. In other words they want the existing, much abused, DMCA subpoena and takedown notice fortified. In 2001 they said the cost of piracy was $3 billion. In 2003 they said it was $29 billion. I guess $3 billion is not enough money to make the headlines, so they had to re-engineer their spurious mechanisms to produce a better figure.

In short the BSA is a bully, a liar and its actions are, as the grandparent poster argued, indefensible.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[AbbyNormal]

Have you ever received a letter from the BSA? Coinicidentally, we only received one after we let one of our MS action pack subscriptions lapse (but purchased another). In not so many words, they threatened with forcing us to prove we've destroyed our remaining unlicensed copies of software. Ironically on the same day, we received our renewal receipt for the Action Pack. You can imagine all the "warm and fuzzies" the BSA letter gave us.

Basically, they are a roving band of pirate lawyers looking for plunder. Mafia tactics, that border on harassment, not these "do-gooders of Copyright laws" you proclaim.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Dilbert? People still read that?

Man, I've SO dropped out of pop culture. Glad not to have cable. Listen mostly to NPR. From the outside so much of the mass-media looks like a waste. I've actually become pleased when someone says Dilbert/Friends/RealityShowX and I don't know what they're talking about.

Wait. Oh shit - is this how it started for my father?!

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[J_Omega]

I used to like Dilbert, but I cannot stand any comic strip that whores itself out to corporate interests in this way. A comic strip is not an advertising platform.
Peanuts --> MetLife
The Simpsons --> Butterfinger
The Flintstones --> Winston Cigarettes
There's more I've not thought of I'm sure.
I need my morning cup of brain-juice...

And this is exactly the same as a Hollywood/Music/Althelete Celeb selling Product-Q. Because Robert DeNiro is in an advert for American Express hasn't really changed my opinion on his acting abilities.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Hatta]

Bill Watterson was able to maintain control over his creation. There is no legitimate Calvin & Hobbes merchandice, except the books of course.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[dustmite]

I don't recall ever seeing any 'MetLife' adverts in a Peanuts comic strip .. could you elaborate on that?

You're right, and I'm fully aware, that so many cartoonists (and other artists) sell out ... here's a quote from Bill Watterson: "Of course, to be fair to the syndicates, most cartoonists are happy to sell out, too." I still don't like it. In particular I don't like it when it's done deceptively, which is increasingly the case .. i.e. "product placement" vs. an obvious paid endorsement in an advert. Advertisers have long been trying to blur the lines that make regular advertising clearly distinct (so far with GREAT success because people are by and large incredibly naive and gullible). E.g. this site pretends to be a genuine blog, but is obviously written by an advertising firm. There are tonnes of fake blogs out there, and fake "fan sites" and such to drum up "ground level" "buzz". And it works. Companies like Microsoft hire people to write to forums like slashdot, pretending to be "regular IT guys" who 'chose Microsoft because it made sense'. I mean, we dismiss this sort of thing with "yeah that's guerilla marketing and companies need to make money", but surely all this deception and lies amounts to fraud, one surely has to draw the line somewhere and say "advertising should be obviously advertising".

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[HuguesT]

With all due respect, that's exactly what I meant. Of course the BSA is a bully. Let the bully build its own grave with its teeth.

The worse the BSA behaves the better for Free Software.

If your business was 100% FreeBSD (For a change) you could show the BSA bullies through, show them your 100% legal, empty license cabinet and let them inspect you to death with nothing to fear.

Some smart business are realizing this and might actually be looking forward to the day the BSA inspects them so they can have a good chuckle.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[CAIMLAS]

Oh, quite the opposite. Some comic strips are designed from the ground up as advertising platforms. They don't have any humor value for anyone over 6, and yet still manage to at least make some money with the whorish accessorizing.

Maybe some people like it because it's cute (little old women with 12 cats?), but I can't see how anyone with a wit of humor would find it humorous.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[HuguesT]

I agree, they are not do-gooders but I wish every business was getting a BSA visit every year.

They get BSA visits because they sign contract with their members which let them open to random visits. The only way to stop them would be to not sign them, i.e. look at alternatives. The BSA gets away with the tactics they use because their users allow themselves to be abused in this way through the contracts they *sign*.

The BSA is not a maffia, they use *legal* tactics.

Linux, BSD and even Apple products don't get a look in because individuals and businesses don't factor in the real cost of Windows and associated software. They mostly get away with pirating.

If everyone I know who is using Word & Excel at home were forced to actually pay for the software they use they would simply not do it.

When I write that the BSA works for Linux I don't mean that they support it in a positive way, but that they are making the alternative OS look better, because these by definition don't come with a bully when you use them.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[SilverspurG]

I think many slashdotters believe they are simply entitled to freely access all copyrighted works

And there are those of us who feel that copyright is a load of bull-honkety from the outset.

Want to preserve your copyright? Don't write it down in a form which is easily copied.

Cope.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

The GPL, BSD license and the like all use the underlying copyright laws. If copyright laws are not enforced then those licenses are worthless as well.

I think unnecessary is the word you're looking for.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

Of course, I think many slashdotters believe they are simply entitled to freely access all copyrighted works... This is an anarchistic twist on the FSF's notion that software patents are morally wrong.

More like an extension to the FSF's notion that everyone is entitled to freely access all software.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[J_Omega]

elaborate? well, I think it was misunderstood, perhaps.

No, the firm MetLife (or, afaik, any other company) was never referenced within the Peanuts strip itself; the Peanuts characters were, however, used in a advert campaign. The same applies to the BSAEngs page; the well known Dilbert is used to promote the agenda. I see what looks like a typical Dilbert 3-pane strip there, but was this same strip used as a daily comic submission? The strip doesn't even directly mention the BSAEngs, it just focuses on their motivation.

As an aside, I find it rather amusing (truely ironic?) that that BSAEngineers.com site's first page has a link to "FREE Software Audit Tools" that takes you to? ~ ERROR ~ Page not found.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

If you don't like copyright, don't use copyrighted things at all. People create works because they understand that under US law they will be protected by copyright. Your position is one of convenience rather than principle. If you were some sort of performer or writer and people were willing to pay for your creative works and you decided to turn down the money, then your position would hold water. You just want free MP3s.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

True... Though that notion flies in the face of the basic social contract and civilization. When someone agrees to particular terms to provide something, others operating under the rule of law abide by the law if they decide to take the item.

When people download EULA'ed software or copyrighted music and then proceed to ignore the contract under which it was sold, that is theft.

It is fine to disagree with the concept of copyright or to believe that everyone is entitled to all software, but saying that a developer who worked hard on some code to put food on the table must give you that code free (after he spend his time working on it with the expectation that people would pay for it) is coercion and theft.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[dustmite]

Actually, Garfield was not designed "from the ground up" as an advertising platform or for it's merchandising potential. I have a copy of the first garfield book (1978, IIRC) in my comics collection, and believe me, Garfield started out as a truly ugly, fat, unattractive, blobby, strong-armed comic cat, with not one bit of cuteness whatsoever ... it had a grand total of zero merchandising potential as it stood, and the early strips were more humorous IMO. As the strip became successful, and it's creator and the syndicate began to realise the merchandising potential and other various "big business" opportunities, the Garfield character was slowly changed from the original fat, ugly, miserable cat to the "appealing, cute" one-dimensional character that we see now selling so many lunchboxes, t-shirts etc. This was another case of artist turned (very rich) commercial sell-out. In the Jim Davis' wrote and drew the strips himself, but nowadays it's just a hired team of replaceable artists trained to mimic a +/- mid-80's Garfield style as much as possible, the whole thing is approached as a "product" and as a vehicle for marketing other products. There is no room for creativity in this setup at all, as obviously the characters no longer become true "characters", as they cannot develop. The over-commercialization of comics seems to be similar to what happened to the the American movie, television and music industries. It's ironic that the country that invented movies, television and comics, that was the major global 'driving force' and thriving hub of cultural creativity in these fields until about the 50s or so, has now swung the opposite way, to a near complete "creative rut", as it all turned to big business and creativity is regarded as an unnecessary risk - genericness and well-worn formulas are "safe" as entertainment is produced factory-line style. If you follow the US comics industry from its birth, there were just so many 'brilliant icons' and role models (like Floyd Gottfredson, Walt Kelly etc.) that one could scarcely have imagined that it could ever end. I wonder if the "trend" will swing back again at some future generation, if America will once again 'become creative'. Or perhaps it will be only in newer media forms, such as computer games.

Of course, nowadays there is some creativity and innovation picking up "at the fringes", in the form of e.g. some rather brilliant Web comics, and the occasional good graphic novel. But there's an important different: pre-1960, the good stuff was popular media, while nowadays the good stuff is 'fringe' and barely known while in popular media we get crap like Garfield, Friends, boy bands, 17-year old "pop divas" who can't write any of their own songs, and a million text-book-formula 'genre-flicks', i.e. predictable romantic comedies etc. There are the odd exceptions though, at the fringes where few notice, e.g. Waking Life, Memento, and even some good popular ones like Fight Club, but it's gotten to the point where if I want to be even vaguely 'intellectually challenged' with something original and non-formula then I don't even bother to watch an American movie. Further, just about every American movie you can think of is just copied from either a novel (e.g. Fight Club was based on a novel by a *Russian* novelist), a comic, or another older movie (e.g. Manchurian Candidate, which I guess kids today haven't heard of so they'll think this movie is original).

OK, wondering even more off-topic now, so I'll stop there :)

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

True... Though that notion flies in the face of the basic social contract and civilization.

Are you high? Software has only been protected by copyright law for a few decades, certainly not from the dawn of civilization.

When someone agrees to particular terms to provide something, others operating under the rule of law abide by the law if they decide to take the item.

Not if they never agreed to the terms.

It is fine to disagree with the concept of copyright or to believe that everyone is entitled to all software

Damn straight it is.

but saying that a developer who worked hard on some code to put food on the table must give you that code free (after he spend his time working on it with the expectation that people would pay for it) is coercion and theft.

I'll quote the FSF directly for the response to this one:

There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.

Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.

The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

That quote from the FSF is just plain absurd. If the goal is to maximize hte benefit of humanity who is to decide how to do that? Why has the FSF settled on software patents as the main source of harm to humanity instead of, say, disease, famine, illiteracy, infant mortality, etc.?

The notion that there can ever be something that is best for humanity presupposes that some individual or group of individuals is fit to decide what is best (or else one supports anarchy in which software becomes secondary to personal security in most people's daily set of things to deal with)...

So since no single individual can possibly be fit (in a Democracy) to decide what is best for humanity, it makes sense for everyone to decide on his/her own. Again, if you oppose the notion of anarchy, then software license terms that are a condition of purchase must be respected.

Consider the idea that in nearly any business, particular prices come with particular terms. If you want to buy one CD for personal use you pay $14, but if you want to own the right to distribute the CD internationally you'd have to pay a lot more (since it's worth a lot more)... Just because you can distribute something internationally is irrelevant. You can buy some guns and rob a bank, but that does not entitle you to what is inside.

In other words, any argument against software fees is an argument against the social contract and against the rule of law.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Garabito]

In the slashdot main page I just saw these ad:

Does your company copy software illegally?
Illegal copying is software piracy and it's against the law. Report Software Piracy Today

Are you going to boycott /. too?

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

That quote from the FSF is just plain absurd. If the goal is to maximize hte benefit of humanity who is to decide how to do that?

The law should certainly help, and not hinder, such a goal.

Why has the FSF settled on software patents as the main source of harm to humanity instead of, say, disease, famine, illiteracy, infant mortality, etc.?

Why do you keep saying patents? Their focus is on software copyright. And they've focussed on software as opposed to those other problems because they're the Free Software Foundation. No foundation can focus on all the worlds problems at once. The FSF has focussed on the problem of the lack of free software, especially the infringement of our rights in the form of copyright law.

So since no single individual can possibly be fit (in a Democracy) to decide what is best for humanity, it makes sense for everyone to decide on his/her own.

But we don't have such a choice. The government has already decided for us that we are not allowed to copy works produced by someone else without their permission.

Again, if you oppose the notion of anarchy, then software license terms that are a condition of purchase must be respected.

I've never really had a problem with the copyright on software I've bought. In fact, I can only think of two or three software title's I've ever bought, and one of them was free software. But even then, requiring a meeting of the minds and agreement before a contract can be formed certainly doesn't imply anarachy. In fact, eliminate the notions of copyright and you'll pretty much never see a situation where someone can be considered to have agreed to a contract with a third party just by buying a product. If anyone my contract is with the store from which I purchased the product. Furthermore, breach of contract does not fall under criminal law, as copyright does, and you generally cannot sue for much beyond the actual damages you've caused.

Consider the idea that in nearly any business, particular prices come with particular terms. If you want to buy one CD for personal use you pay $14, but if you want to own the right to distribute the CD internationally you'd have to pay a lot more (since it's worth a lot more)...

You're using copyright to prove copyright. I reject the notion that one should have to respect restrictions on what they can do with a CD they have purchased.

In other words, any argument against software fees is an argument against the social contract and against the rule of law.

I'm not arguing against software fees, I'm arguing against software copyright (and copyright in general, for that matter). That's an argument against the current laws, perhaps, but copyright is by no means necessary for the rule of law. To quote the GNU Manifesto again, "People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of legislation for specific purposes."

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

The notion that there is no intrinsic right to copyright is like saying that there no intrinsic right to freedom from slavery. I'd like to see a list of what my supposed intrinsic right are before I buy such a statement. Rather than being a notion of some kind of basic right, copyright is simply the terms under which many people invest their time and work.

The problem with your argument is that you are happy to ignore the fact that the people who worked hard to make the software were under the impression that it would be protected by copyright after they finished it.

It's awefully convenient to leach onto a society that has evolved around a system of copyright and as a result has millions of people productively employed creating copyrighted material.

The correct approach would be to challenge the constitutionality of copyright, or start a public awareness campaign about the benefits of an alternative system.

Lots of people use the psudo-philosophical jargon in the FSF documentation to justify their hard drive full of Warez and downloaded music, hence all the talk of the immorality of copyright.

What is more immoral is disregarding the rules that have existed thusfar and instead of trying to change the rules simply violating them.

The entire system that employs people to create copyrighted material is based on the existence of copyright, and so if you don't like copyright, then reverse the current situation in the courts (or through enough theft to make the producers go out of business) and watch the amount of material created slowly dwindle toward zero.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

The notion that there is no intrinsic right to copyright is like saying that there no intrinsic right to freedom from slavery.

It's a similar notion, but I agree with the former and not the latter.

I'd like to see a list of what my supposed intrinsic right are before I buy such a statement.

A list? I'm afraid I can't dummy it down that well for you. You may want to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_right for an introduction to the concept, though.

The problem with your argument is that you are happy to ignore the fact that the people who worked hard to make the software were under the impression that it would be protected by copyright after they finished it.

Please, as though the people who make the software ever hold the copyright on it. In the vast majority of cases those workers have already been paid. Maybe we could grant an exception in a few cases, but I don't feel sorry about those who took their chances on Microsoft stock.

The correct approach would be to challenge the constitutionality of copyright

Copyright is perfectly constitutional, though.

or start a public awareness campaign about the benefits of an alternative system.

There are already many of these. They're working to a large extent. I think we'll be free of copyright eventually. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I sure hope so.

Lots of people use the psudo-philosophical jargon in the FSF documentation to justify their hard drive full of Warez and downloaded music, hence all the talk of the immorality of copyright.

Right, because warez and "downloaded music" are perfectly legitimate.

What is more immoral is disregarding the rules that have existed thusfar and instead of trying to change the rules simply violating them.

There's nothing immoral about breaking bad laws.

The entire system that employs people to create copyrighted material is based on the existence of copyright, and so if you don't like copyright, then reverse the current situation in the courts (or through enough theft to make the producers go out of business) and watch the amount of material created slowly dwindle toward zero.

That's nonsense. People created things before copyright. They'll continue to create things after it is gone. Just look at all the free software out there. Other than my OS, I use pretty much exclusively free software. And if Microsoft stopped making Windows, I'm sure Linux would become just as good or more likely better in a year or two.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

By choosing not to enumerate the rights that you feel are natural rights, you are neglecting to consider the ramifications of your statement. Copyright is a law, and the vast majority of laws are not specifically derived from natural rights, but are the consequences of the evolution of our basic social contract into a legal system capable of handling the needs of a complex society.

Copyright is quite simply the extension of the notion of property to a particular presentation of ideas.

Copyright is a structure that was put in place so that people would take the time to innovate new ways of presenting ideas, since the innovation of such things was valued more than the simple act of copying the ideas.

Copyright came into being in order to promote the activity of creating new innovation. This was based on two very simple observations:

People need to do something productive to put food on the table

People who are busy toiling in fields will have little time to innovate new ideas

Wouldn't it be nice if society could create a structure that would 1) give people an incentive to help everone by creating intellecutal property that is highly valued, and 2) allow people to sell that intellectual property so that they can have enough time to do it full time, since they're good at it.

The advent of structures such as corporations are yet a further advancement on the above structure: Wouldn't it be nice if people who had extra money could pool their resources and hire talented people to create stuff that those talented people couldn't afford to create on their own because they have to keep a day job or becuase the materials or marketing are expensive.

Corporations are just a bunch of folks pooling together talent and money in order to make everyone better off. Were it not for the corporation's initial investors, the talent would have been wasted while those people did other stuff that they weren't as good at and didn't like as much.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because this is a clearly labeled paid advertisement, as opposed to a comic strip character telling that making copyrighted software available on the internet (like Linux, GNU, BSD, etc.) kills innovation and harms economy. There is a huge difference, I'm surprised that you can't see it from your ivory tower.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[Anonymous Coward]

What in your link is objectionable? I don't get it...seems like the text is spot on to me. (insert comments from other links showing that this actually supports Linux et. al)

Supports Linux? Dilbert saying that making copyrighted software available on the Internet (like Linux!) kills innovation and collapses economy supports Linux? Sorry, but are you fuckin nuts? This is Dilbert saying exactly what MS anti-F/OSS propaganda is saying for God's sake!

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

By choosing not to enumerate the rights that you feel are natural rights, you are neglecting to consider the ramifications of your statement.

Fair enough. We'll leave the question of whether or not copyright is a natural right open. You claim it is, I suggest it is not. Neither of us want to engage in a year long seminar on what does or doesn't constitute a natural right, so we'll leave such a question unanswered.

I agree with pretty much the rest of what you say. Copyright was created to resolve a free-rider problem. One thing I'd like to note though is that copyright was created to encourage the creation of artistic works, not productive works and certainly not ideas (to this day copyright is prohibited from being extended to ideas). But you seem to understand the general concept so this is really just a nit-pick.

I think we both have to agree that copyright has both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, it encourages creation of some copyrighted works. There are indisputably some copyrighted works which would not be created without copyright. On the negative side, it discourages use and enhancement of some copyrighted works. It is indisputable that more people would utilize certain copyrighted works were it not for copyright law, and it is indisputable that there would be more enhancements made to certain copyrighted works were it not for copyright law.

It is my opinion, certainly with regard to software, that the negatives greatly outweigh the positives. In fact, the only category of software which I believe would greatly suffer from the abolishment of copyright is that of games. Perhaps not coincidentally, this category also consists of the the type of software which is most rooted in the original concept of copyright, that of artistic works.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

Interesting comments.

I agree that there are good and bad things about copyright. Just like with patent law, there is the chance for too much regulation or too little. There was a great book that I read a while back called "The Lever of Riches" which talked about various nations' approaches to patent law over the years and how the prosperity of nations has risen and fallen based on having the right or wrong balance.

What are your thoughts on why software copyrights are so overwhelmingly negative, in comparison to others? How is writing a business rules engine or game AI engine, for example, different from writing a textbook or a novella in the context of copyright?

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

There was a great book that I read a while back called "The Lever of Riches" which talked about various nations' approaches to patent law over the years and how the prosperity of nations has risen and fallen based on having the right or wrong balance.

I'll see if I can get a copy (wouldn't it be great if I could just download it off Kazaa). I'm fairly convinced that free software is the way to go, but I'm still rather on the fence when it comes to open content. It's kind of hard to produce a great novel without some sort of funding, and it's really hard to fund a novel sans copyright when you don't know what the outcome is going to be before it's finished.

What are your thoughts on why software copyrights are so overwhelmingly negative, in comparison to others? How is writing a business rules engine or game AI engine, for example, different from writing a textbook or a novella in the context of copyright?

The biggest reason is probably the fact that software is pretty much always a work in progress. It's meant to be extended and to be debugged. You can have a sequel to a novella, but that's about it. It's not anything like programming where you can nearly always build on an old work and make it better. Besides this storytelling generally works best with one or a very small number of writers. Software thrives on having lots of programmers. Textbooks and other non-fiction I believe falls closer to the software end of things. This is one of the reasons the world of open content is thriving almost exclusively on non-fiction works like Wikipedia.

Another difference is with regard to funding. The creation of a business rules engine could be funded by a consortium of businesses which would use the engine. Perhaps a game AI engine could be funded through an online service for the game, but that really depends on the type of game. As I said, games tend to be the low point of my argument. Many game creators would probably have to rely on DRM to stay in business (and unlike many Slashdotters, I've got no problem with DRM in theory, and while I don't like using crippleware I think it's much less harmful than relying on FBI agents and civil lawsuits). Of course, there aren't very many successful civil lawsuits over game piracy, and the FBI almost never gets involved in such things, so the game creators are already forced to rely on DRM and/or online services to a large extent. When it comes to funding the writing of a novella, your options are very limited. Steven King tried one method, and it really didn't work. Perhaps part of the problem is you can't really define the specifications of a work of fiction very well. With software it's rather easy to specify what you want and put it in a contract, and you can somewhat easily make checkpoints along the way to ensure that your money is being spent wisely. Again it seems textbooks, and other non-fiction works, fall more on the software end of things.

Is this a reasonable distinction to make from a legal point of view? It seems it certainly is. If my education on the matter was correct I believe there was much legal argument over whether or not software should fall under copyright law in the first place. The line between "expression", which is copyrightable, and "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery", which is not copyrightable, is rather thin when it comes to software (although, incidently, not as much so with games where at least the characters and rules fall rather clearly into the expression camp). When a programmer makes tax software is she expressing herself, or is she just describing a process? I'd say the latter, but Congress clearly intends software to fall under the scope of copyright at this point so that's not going to change without new law.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

Interesting thoughts. It would be nice if you coudl download the book from Kazaa, but the author (Mokyr) did such a great job that I would love to see him make some royalties. I mean, the guy must have spent at leat a year writing the book and he started out with tons of knowledge, etc.

Your point about software being something that can always be added to is true some of the time. Consider the situation with the unauthorized sequel that was written to Gone with the Wind. The family members of the author took the author of the unauthorized sequel to court, saying that that person had violated the copyright by borrowing significant themes and chracters from the original work.

I found that argument absurd, since a book is so much more than its themes and charcters.

I think that code is a lot like creative writing in a lot of ways... primarily in that it is an expression of the writer's creativity and ability to present a solution to a problem in a way that is understandable both to other humans and to the machine it will run on. The ability of that code to ever be a work in progress is also largely determined by the skill of the original programmer.

It is only fairly recently that software projects have taken on the massive scale that they currently have. In the past, a team of developers inside a single corporation was typically responsible for everything. That model was not ideal for all situations, however, and so something better was needed. How can companies still retain an incentive to produce great software, but still be able to tackle large projects that are outside of the scope of what they can handle using only their existing resources?

The answer is, creative licensing. The BSD license, the GPL and LGPL, the Apache license, etc., are all examples of the nuanced ways that businesses have been able to cooprate not only with other businesses but with educational institutions and individual developers all over the world.

In fact, some of these licenses specifically define the terms under which the software may be considered owned and when it may be copied.

This solution has solved the problem of the locally optimal state that existed prior, and has allowed for collaboration that helps everyone reach a global optimum.

What solved the problem of the greater good? In this case, it was not a top-down, wholesale change of laws but a simple, bottom-up, 100% voluntary introduction of new licenses into the fray. Nobody forced Sun to open up XFS or its DB software, but Sun did so voluntarily.

Some companies (such as game shops) choose the more restrictive licenses to protect their creative investment, while others choose the more open onces to facilitate the creation of economies of scale around their software platform.

The very problem that led to the creation of the FSF has been solved, but in a far more creative way than Richard Stallman could ever have imagined when he wrote his first rant.

The best part is, there is still a niche for copyrighted software, but as the openness of software increases and the licenses gain widespread use, the companies that stick to the old way of hiding behind their copyright are goinig to lose more and more ground.

Microsoft, the most profitable and successful company in the history of the world, has begun to open up its sources, albeit in a somewhat restrictive way. Sun is opening up sources left and right, as is IBM. IBM is also opening up patents in a huge move that is going to allow the commons to sink its productive teeth into that big pile of great ideas and shake things up even further.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[anthony_dipierro]

The ability of that code to ever be a work in progress is also largely determined by the skill of the original programmer.

Are you saying some programmers might right the perfect code? Even if they did (and c'mon, no one writes perfect code), there would still be the possibility for enhancement as hardware changes come about. Maybe I'm grasping at straws on that one, but there's always at least some improvement you can do to any software.

What solved the problem of the greater good? In this case, it was not a top-down, wholesale change of laws but a simple, bottom-up, 100% voluntary introduction of new licenses into the fray.

I think you've got a good point there. Changing the laws might not be necessary (though it would probably speed things up).

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

I just meant that the lack of skill that the original programmer has may in fact make the code virtually unmaintainable and unusable by anyone. So in effect, writing code and designing an "extensible" architecture is something of an art form.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[SilverspurG]

People create works because they understand that under US law they will be protected by copyright

Are you saying that in a world without some vacuous governmental law which is outside the enforcement price for the vast majority of people no one would create anything?

Bull-honkety.

You just want free MP3s

I don't have a single mp3 which I don't own on store-bought CD. I don't use common P2P software because I don't trust it from a security standpoint.

Try again.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

The overwhelming majority of what is created is created by entities that can afford to pay to enforce the copyright.

Technologies like DRM will be helpful in allowing much smaller entities to enjoy the same power as large corporations because it will be much cheaper to enforce. Ultimately, though, copyright law is a benefit to everyone except thieves.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[SilverspurG]

DRM will be helpful in allowing much smaller entities to enjoy the same power as large corporations because it will be much cheaper to enforce

Never mind cost of implementation and the cost of membership to the various certified consortiums.

What? I'm supposed to roll over because you said it would be cheaper? DRM will not result in anything being cheaper.

Re:Dilbert == BSA whore

[rnd()]

That was just an added benefit. The nice thing about DRM is that it will inevitably be cheaper than lawyers, because if it weren't then nobody would bother to create it. QED.

Once the initial standards are in place, publishing DRM'ed works will become easy for anyone to do, as will distributing them. (My idea is to create an open DRM standard that allows for reselling at owner-determined prices, with a fixed percentage going to the original creator -- you'd end up with something more equivalent to ebay where markets set the price for everything and previously owned items competed with new items just like in the physical world)...

HURD + Linux ports for modules + Gentoo

[michalf]

The way I see it is:

1. Hurd enables the port for Linux kernel modules (it was the case in the Mach series as I believe but the port was quite old 2.0.xx modules or so)

2. Port Gentoo to Hurd

I really hope Hurd developers can create better kernel than the Linux one. With all the woooo for Linux it is still not a perfect solution - buffer overflows etc. Such things should not happen in a good designed kernel.

If you add kernel hotplug and scalability (native clusters) there would be NO competition for Hurd. I hope ;-)

best regards - Michal

Oma desala

[Anonymous Coward]

He says: 'We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!'"

If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago.

Or...

A mirror of the screenshot

[roxtar]

http://marcus-brinkmann.org/banner.jpg

flame of the day

[Tumbleweed]

Look, congrats and all, but if I'm going to run a pointless operating system, it's going to be one that's actually impressive, like MenuetOS .

Re:flame of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

MenuetOS is a hobby Operating System for the PC written entirely in 32bit assembly language

These guys sure have faith...

Re:flame of the day

[kahei]

I followed your MenuetOS link.

Wow. Now _that_ is pointless, and by 'pointless' I mean 'pointless on such a grand, heroic scale as to have acquired deep fundamental meaning purely by virtue of its extreme pointlessness'.

It should become the new standard. To think, we were shilly-shallying around with high-level constructs like C APIs and compilers! Well, no more -- MenuetOS is now my choice of totally useless impossible pipe-dream OS.

Re:flame of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

...which also fits uncompressed on a floppy disk, and supports just about every core function you could require in an OS.....

You should be thankful that there are people out there doing stuff like this, instead of people like yourself bitching and not contributing in any way to anything.

Sort of conflicted

[Eskarel]

On the one hand this sounds really neat and when it's far enough along that I can play with it I probably will.

On the other hand, every so often, even the linux kernel devs get sort of rabid and out of control. I don't like proprietary software any more than the next guy, but if it's the best tool for the job then that's life, and it should run. I shudder to imagine what HURD will be like in this regard, we'll none of us be allowed to run anything at all if RMS has his way.

Re:Ok, I know you're only allowed one joke, but ..

[TheoMurpse]

Don't you mean, "FRIST CDOE!"?

ok lameness filter time for much lowercase stuff ok ok ok lameness filter dealt with time to post

Seven system calls? This sounds like...

[gotr00t]

BRAINFUCK! Or something like that with one less command.

Re:Seven system calls? This sounds like...

[js7a]

Well, there are seven actual system calls but a few dozen support routines built on them. The actual system calls are just like, "act on this kernel interface page which contanges message(s) and/or parameter updates and/or other instructions." And also the kernel ABI has more than the API does, IIRC.

False Dichotomy

[warrax_666]

There's no indication that the people working on HURD would work on Linux if they couldn't work on HURD. Although you might speculate that they would, they might equally well work on one of the BSDs.

And I doubt that Hurd would have any noticeable advantages over Linux.

Oh, it has lots of advantages, particularly for "kernel" developers and system administrators. For developers, implementing e.g. new file systems is much, much easier than in a monolithic kernel (although FUSE has helped here it still feels kind of like a hack). For sysadmins there is much less privileged code to worry about. (There's lots more but those are the ones that spring to mind).

Re:False Dichotomy

[mbanck]

There's no indication that the people working on HURD would work on Linux if they couldn't work on HURD.

Actually, Roland McGrath, one of the two main architects of the GNU Hurd, is now working for RedHat and frequently posts patches to linux-kernel, presumingly due to his work on glibc/linux interaction...

Michael

Re:False Dichotomy

[BlackHawk-666]

I look forward to the day when I can dual boot either a Hurd or Linux kernel and run *all* my *nix software, just like choosing between a 2.4/2.6 kernel today. I'd like to toy with the hurd, later, when it has something to offer, but not at the expense of running two setups. Any idea if this is possible?

Re:False Dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland McGrath was one of the original authors of libc 6 (Glibc 2) but it is now handled by Ulrich Drepper. Roland is still very heavily involved in Glibc development, so yes that's very likely why you see him posting on the LKML.

Re:False Dichotomy

[Bas_Wijnen]

No, this will not be possible. Executables must be linked with the exact libraries they use. Libc is very much dependant on the underlying system, which is quite different for Hurd and Linux (or even for Hurd on Mach and Hurd on L4).

So all programs must be recompiled, which means you will need two systems.

Obligatories

[grolschie]

"You must be GNU here"
"Yes, but does it run GNU/Linux?"
"In Soviet Russia the first program executes GNU/Hurd"
"Netcraft confirms it, GNU/Hurd is dying"
"In Korea, only old people use GNU/Hurd"
"GNU/Hurd isn't ready for the desktop"
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
"I've got a greased up GNU shoved up my..."
And lastly, something about a herd of Natalie Portmans and hot grits....

almost done eh?

[Deternal]

Guess it's time to restart based on the brand spanking new L5 kernel then? :P

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to be slashdotted, so..

A historic first step for the Hurd/L4 microkernel port
Submitted by nsk on 3 February, 2005 - 05:39.

After hard development work and numerous code contributions, Marcus Brinkmann implemented process initialisation, the important internal functionality in the Hurd/L4 project that allows programs to be invoked through the activation of a process and the subsequent execution of software code by the computer. This means that the Hurd/L4 developers are now free to focus on implementing further features that will be directly visible to the end user, like executing more complex applications.

HURD/L4 is an ambitious project to port the already-functioning Hurd-Mach to the L4 microkernel.

The Hurd is a collection of servers running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel, implementing various services that operating systems usually offer, like file system access and networking. It is GNU's replacement for the Unix kernel, and currently it can support a graphics environment, is usable by experienced end users and is used by the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution. However, the implementation is still not appropriate for production environments or home end users.

GNU is a project started in 1985 by Richard M. Stallman for the creation of a Free operating system resembling Unix. Together with the Linux kernel (created by Linus Torvalds) it forms the core system of the numerous GNU/Linux distributions that are available today, like RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and many others.

GNU Mach and Hurd were in development from 1990, long before the GNU developers heard about Linux, but they decided to continue working on it because of its superior architecture. According to Richard Stallman's "Hurd and Linux" message: "Given the years of work we had already put into the Hurd, we decided to finish it rather than throw them away ... We hope its superior architecture will make free operating systems more powerful". HURD running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel first booted in 1994 and became GNU's official kernel, according to the Hurd history page.
Hurd Logo

However the developers later decided to port Hurd to the advanced L4 microkernel, which although very powerful and fast, the extra development needed for the transition slowed HURD development by years, but it never halted. The Hurd/L4 development is very active, as evidenced by the CVS commits mailing list and the CVS repository.

L4 is a second-generation microkernel originally developed by Dr. Jochen Liedtke who, while in Germany, had developed the previous L3 microkernel/OS and its predecessor, EUMEL. He unveiled the 12-Kbyte fast L4 microkernel after 1996 while working for IBM in New York City. Prof. Jochen Liedtke died unexpectedly on 10 June 2001, at the age of 48.

A microkernel is a minimalistic kernel which provides only the basic functionality needed to run special modules on top of it which provide the usual services of an operating system. The disadvantage of microkernels is that they generally run slower than monolithic kernels, although this didn't discourage Andrew Tanenbaum to debate with Linus Torvalds about a microkernel approach to Linux. L4 achieved an impressive breakthrough in microkernel performance by being highly customised for specific hardware architectures (and even for specific CPUs).

The development of the GNU/Hurd has important emotional and practical value to GNU fans because in 1990s GNU had not completed any kernel and used the Linux kernel out of necessity. Thus, a number of GNU fans feel that they will have "pure GNU" only with the Hurd kernel. The practical value of the GNU/Hurd is that it is built over a fast powerful microkernel, benefiting from the many advantages of that approach.

However, Hurd/L4 is not be the only software running on top of the powerful L4 microkernel: A version of the Linux kernel running on L4 already exists, and it is named L4Linux. The L4 developer community is very active and

early bird gets the worm, but...

[jeif1k]

Mach was still an active CMU project when the Hurd glacier began its very slow creep from the peaks of lofty idealism towards the throng of onlookers waiting patiently for the free unix kernel they always craved to reach them.

Well, its pace is matched then by the very slow creep of systems like Linux (and OS X and Windows) towards some semblance of coherent design and implementation.

You see, when you implement a system, you have two choices: you can do a shoddy and cheap job initially and fix things up later (Linux, Macintosh, Windows) but grab lots of market share, or you can try to do it right and not get a lot of market share.

Of course things are not black and white: some quick and dirty jobs (Linux, NeXT) are not quite as shoddy as others (Macintosh OS 1-9, Windows 3.1). And some people just can't design a decent system even if you give them nearly infinite resources and time (like the Windows NT kernel).

I'm glad efforts like L4Ka exist. The Linux kernel is not infinitely extensible, and we will need something to replace it eventually. Whether it's this or something else, I don't know. But you shouldn't sneer at it.

Re:early bird gets the worm, but...

[TheRaven64]

And some people just can't design a decent system even if you give them nearly infinite resources and time (like the Windows NT kernel).

I strongly disagree with this statement. The Windows NT kernel was very advance. It has departed slightly from its microkernel roots in recent versions, but still has a number of nice features. I suggest you read Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for more information.

The cruft on top of it, however, is an entirely different matter...

Re:early bird gets the worm, but...

[jeif1k]

The Windows NT kernel was very advance. It has departed slightly from its microkernel roots in recent versions, but still has a number of nice features

Yes, it has features. Lots of them. That's what makes it such a lousy design. KISS

So...

[mustafap]

It's at the same stage as Linux was in 1994?

Great. I'm 40 next month, so maybe I will still be alive when its ready for the desktop!

Re:So...

[julesh]

It's at the same stage as Linux was in 1994?

I think it's more like the stage Linux was at in 1991. But it promises to progress faster, 'cause a lot of bits are already there that had to be written for Linux from scratch.

By 2006, it'll be 1995 all over again.

Ah, Slackware 3, whatever happened to you? :)

High Performance

[R.Caley]

Do you think the total time saved by all the processes which ever run on the L4-HURD on any machine anywhere will ever be larger than the time taken to switch from MACH to L4?

Tanebaum

[BenjyD]

Now where'd I put that 200MIPS SparcStation to run it on...

Re:Tanebaum

[quarkscat]

You left that 200 MIPS SparcStation over at
my house, you twit. Don't you remember you
brought it over to blow all the cobwebs out
with my air compressor?

It's still here - I haven't pitched it out.
When are you coming over to pick it up?

BTW: If it stays here until 2007, I'm
claiming it for myself - I have a
really great idea for a case mod
for that Mac Mini system board.

historical document

[groomed]

I am MR MBOTO SHAW, Testamentory Executor of the Will of joe_bruin by appointment and prior arrangements made by the Township of KWANZAA-TOBOGO. After further investigation of his Next of Kin proved fruitless, I come to you in utmost Confidentiality so that the fruits of this old man's labor will not get into the hands of corrupt Township officials.

Date: Unknown
Place: Slashdot

when me and richard m. stallman (the m stands for 'merryweather', did
you know that?) started GNU/hurd back in 1908, we were out to replace
the closed-internals of the international business machines (ibm)
automatic punch card tabulator, which was at use at the time in the
department of the census (where me and rich were summer interns).
those machines had a 2mm steel case sealed with canadian metric square
screws (wherever you call them, please don't correct me). since nobody
had any metric screwdrivers at the time, much less square ones, we had
no access to the internal cogs and wheels of the tabulator. we
definitely did not want to punch through the casing, because that
would void our warranty and service contract, and we would have to
contract ibm to build us a second tabulator (which cost nearly 200
american dollars, and took 7 months to assemble).

when it (frequently) broke down, we had to call an ibm machinist to
come open the case for us and oil the flywheel or unjam the transverse
flying arm on the card-feeder. as you can imagine, this seemed hardly
the ideal solution, because usually all it needed was a little bit of
work that me and rich could easily perform (even through we were not
trained calculating machine operators).
long story short, we starting working on the GNU/hurd tabulator. the
centerpiece to our system was the pipelined card loader, which could
load the next punchcard while the calculating engine was stilll
churning on the previous card. we had also designed the system so that
you could have dual loading mechanisms, so that one would always be
running if the other jammed. rich always insisted that we should
publish the blueprints for our machine, so that other people in our
tabulation club could also build similar machines, and help us with
the design. to me the whole idea sounded a bit bolshevik, but richard
seemed intent to follow through with it, and i didn't mind so much.
honestly, i didn't believe he would ever be able to publish anything,
given that his handwriting was quite terrible (although he was working
on a new type of typewriter, the electro-macs so that he would be
somewhat more legible).

5 years later, when i was conscripted to join the great war in europe,
we had a nearly complete tabulator in hand. we had solved nearly all
the problems of page clipping and bending that were present in our
earlier builds, and our machine could run at a rate of well over 70
cards per minute (compared to the ibm's 42). however, we never
completed the loader fully, and the latest model i saw could only hold
3 cards on the loading queue, making it much less than useful (however
promising).

i've lost contact with rich during the war years. i had always assumed
he's been killed in action. anyway, i'm glad to see he's still going
strong with our GNU/hurd tabulator, and wish him well on it. hopefully
it will be done before my great grandkids graduate college.

-- joe_bruin @ slashdot

Linux kernel is evolving.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many sections are starting to move to something equal to a microkernel so they cannot stop the system. Init networks are being moved.

Basicly if hurd does not get a move on it will be the OS that promised so much but got beaten.

Re:I'm assuming RMS will switch

[808140]

You're describing the bootstrapping problem, which if I recall correctly is actually described on the GNU website, somewhere.

To answer your question, the GNU devs started out with proprietary operating systems -- primarily SunOS, I think -- and took advantage of the modularity of UNIX to replace one utility at a time. This is why the kernel was the last piece -- because most of what makes a UNIX system run actually resides in user space.

Attempts to create free versions of other OS types -- ReactOS comes to mind -- have a harder time following this example, because most other operating systems are not designed in such a modular way. So they start with the kernel.

More interested in development

[BlackHawk-666]

When I read about projects like this I know it is being worked on by guys who are more interesting in writing code than finishing a project. That's great for them, kudos that they have spent over twenty years on the same basic idea, but what about the people who wanted to actually get some work done in that time frame. The hurd is interesting as an example of a micro-kernel - but I got MP3's to rip, video to encode, documents to write, emails to reply to and life to get on with. Let us all know in another 5 years when they have some useful code running on the hurd.

Re:More interested in development

[osierra.com]

This is best illustrated by the parable of the OSs and the gun:

• With Unix you shoot yourself in the foot.
• With DOS you keep running up against the one-bullet barrier.
• With MS-Windows the gun blows up in your hand.
• With MacOS it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot -- just point and shoot.
• With SVR4 the gun isn't compatible with your foot.
• With Linux generous programmers from around the world all join forces to help you shoot yourself in the foot for free.
• With HURD you'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot Real Soon Now.

Re:More interested in development

[Grab]

Too true.

This is precisely my problem with RMS's theory of freeness. The original reason he developed his whole GNU ideology was due to not being able to get hardware interfaces to work correctly. In other words, he wanted to get some work done and was prevented from doing so by the software he needed not being available. RMS being RMS, he decided he would solve the problem himself, and found that the info he needed to hack the drivers wasn't available. Now there are two possible AND EQUALLY VALID solutions here: either the suppliers make information freely available so that RMS can hack his drivers; OR the suppliers ship decent software in the first place.

Now granted, if all the docs and source for everything was available to everyone then the world certainly would be a better place - but ultimately what counts is having the tools you need to do your job. RMS (and hence clearly the Hurd developers) have confused this "freeness" with being an objective in itself, when really it is just a tool to let other people achieve their objectives.

This is as true in the physical domain as in software. If I want to do some woodwork, I buy a chisel, or borrow one off a friend. I don't give a shit if the specs for the chisel and the process by which it's made are posted on a website somewhere - I want to dig a hole in a bit of wood! If the chisel with its own website is a blunt piece of crap, I'll get one that's sharp and does the job properly.

Frankly, the only reason RMS (and others) can sustain their GNU agenda is that they don't have (and in some cases have never had) real jobs. You know, jobs with deadlines, where you can be made redundant or fired if you're not pulling your weight on a project, and where you don't get a load of time that you can arbitrarily spend on any scheme that takes your fancy. Checking RMS's resume, his background is all Bell Labs and similar "think-tanks". In Ivory Tower Land, such principles are fine - but in the real world, we just want to do stuff, thanks all the same. If your ideologically-perfect OS doesn't work as well as Windows, or if your ideologically-perfect application doesn't work as well as the MS equivalent, I'll ditch it without a moment's hesitation.

And this is where the Hurd people have fallen down. In their pursuit of the ultimate in gold-plating, they've utterly missed the point of delivering something that people can use. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Hurd will never succeed - I don't see how it can, because they've proven time after time that serving their user base is much less important to them than their ideology. And if you screw over your user base, man, you're dead.

Grab.

Re:More interested in development

[Anonymous Coward]

With HURD you'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot Real Soon Now.

Damn, mines a GNU Mach foot and all I have are L4 bullets!

Re:More interested in development

[essreenim]

Get back to work, and stop waisting time. Have you downloaded that Debian ISO for me yet?
No? Then get back to work.

Re:More interested in development

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with you except for the fact that you're treating the FSF/GNU as a corporation that has to develop products for customers. They don't. As RMS has said himself, if there's a free, but unfinished or imperfect solution out there, he'll take it over a non-free, proprietary solution any day of the week. I think while they try to make sure the software is completely useful to everyone, listen to feature requests and bug reports, etc., that is not their primary objective. The primary objective is to make something that works that anyone can modify and use.

So, with your wood chisel analogy, let's modify it a bit. You can buy a wood chisel that is sharp and such, but you are only allowed to use it on certain types of wood, must stand in a certain position when operating it, and are not allowed to give it to your friend to let them borrow it. These are the terms of using the proprietary wood chisel. Now, online there are specifications and instructions on how to build your own chisel. If you disagree with the way they've done something, you can modify the instructions as you see fit to improve it provided you tell the web site of your modifications incase others want to do it. You can even take the chisel you made with their instructions and sell it for a profit, as long as you also provide instructions on how you built it. So, if your freedom isn't worth enough for you to be able to do stuff like that, and you'd rather buy a different chisel for each job because some company tells you that you must, then you'd be the one buying proprietary, non-free software.

Probably not a great example either, but it's hard to put the concepts into words and compare them to any other such relationship. I guess my whole point is that to them, freedom is the most important aspect of all. If they can provide their users or customers with freedom, they have achieved their main objective. I think the success of GNU/HURD is irrelevent. If GNU uses it, and it works for them and finally gives them a 100% free operating system to release to the public, it's a success.

Re:More interested in development

[Hope Thelps]

That's great for them, kudos that they have spent over twenty years on the same basic idea, but what about the people who wanted to actually get some work done in that time frame.

What about them? Are you suggesting that HURD is hurting them somehow? Most of the projects that people around the world are working on are of no use or interest to me but... so?

Re:More interested in development

[geoffspear]

I don't think your analogy works.

Here a better one: you can buy a great wood chisel that's sharp and does everything you want, but its StaySharp(tm) technology is protected by a patent so you're not allowed to make copies of it on your own in different sizes to do different types of woodworking.

Your friend will let you borrow his set of old, dull chisels, which won't really work for the project you're doing, but he's happy to let you try to sharpen them, or make a new set based on the design (which isn't protected by any patents), and he and his friends will even maybe come over and help you sharpen them, if they feel like it.

Re:More interested in development

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, the only reason RMS (and others) can sustain their GNU agenda is that they don't have (and in some cases have never had) real jobs.

Issac Newton, Pythagorus and Magellan did not have real jobs either, by your reckoning. But you need people like them to do what they are good at - pioneering in their field. Maybe RMS could never make a deadline, but it doesn't matter. After people like him have pioneered there are others, better at administration, who will step in and may even take take over completely.

For example, Eric the Red and Christopher Columbus would have been no good at writing constitutions, but OTOH Benjamin Franklin, who was, would have been no good at sailing ships into the unknown.

You can see this process happening in Linux as corporations pick it up, although Linus, Alan Cox and Co are retained for now.

Don't worry, if people become convinced that the Hurd has got over the hill, which might be soon, it will not be left just to Marcus Brinkmann to bring it home.

Re:More interested in development

[daigu]

It doesn't seem you understand RMS and his theory of freeness.

From the site: "Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software."

Using your argument, the supplier would have to product not decent software - but perfect, unimprovable software that met every concievable need, both now and in the future. Something that cannot happen.

So, now that we have eliminated one side of your EITHER/OR and we are left with RMS (and everyone else involved with free software) hacking. Thank God.

As a parting shot, can you tell me who the userbase is for a OS that - just this week - started working to the point it warrants a mention on Slashdot? Maybe they should change the name to HNL (Hurd's Not Linux) so that it can help people that are confused on that point.

Re:More interested in development

[Bloater]

> but what about the people who wanted to actually get some work done in that time frame

Easy, they just used Linux, so where's the problem? Now you could use Linux and get your work done, meanwhile they've been creating the next generation of OS technology that much Linux kernel code will probably be ported to so you can make an evolutionary step to a system with very, very high reliability features. Plus extreme flexibility. :) How good is that?

Re:More interested in development

[squiggleslash]

I suspect the HURD would have been out by 1995 had Linux not arrived. I suspect Linux basically changed things, making a kernel available, and so allowing users to "rip MP3s, encode video, write documents", etc, and thus taking the pressure off the HURD people who could then focus on making something they considered to be truly great.

I don't know if that's a good thing or not. I guess we'll know when the first viable HURDs start to appear. But, given the major change in direction from the project leaders (dumping Mach, switching to L4), I guess we can see already that HURD wasn't "perfect", and would have been far from it had it been released in the first half of the 90's.

Re:More interested in development

[Anonymous Coward]

So, is a Doom II port underway?

Re:More interested in development

[bpd1069]

I agree 100%...

I have noticed, as I am sure many others have as well, that without "radicals" in our society, everything would tend to move to the center. And as a result no change would occur... These "radicals" are needed to pull or push any system to a different (could be high or lower) state.

You don't have to like RMS and people who share his ideology, but you have to respect their determination to change the world, or atleast a small part that they can influence.

Without Radicals, everything would stagnate... Change is often a good thing, IMHO...

Re:More interested in development

[cpghost]

• With Hurd/L4 the microbullets are so tiny, that you risk missing your foot altogether.

Re:More interested in development

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish.

Don't confuse patents with copyrights.

The idea of unfair restrictions on how you use the chisel is indeed equivelent to the restrictions on software.

Re:More interested in development

[Grab]

It's well documented that RMS came up with that philosophy because he ran into a closed-source printer driver that had a bug. Not that it didn't meet every conceivable need, but that it simply was faulty and didn't meet the specific need it was created for.

No, I can't tell you what the userbase is for Hurd - because it doesn't have one. Nor will it ever get one (beyond its developers), unless it can demonstrate such an overwhelming improvement over Linux that it'll supersede it as a kernel.

It seems you don't understand my point either. Free software is nice in theory, but if it doesn't work then what use is it? Suppose I'd bought a PC 5 years ago to run HURD on, and refused to use it unless it ran HURD out of GNU principles (after all, Linux is open source, not free software, per Linus's own opinions). How much work would I have got done? Zero. Zip. Nada. So how much use is it to have freedom to run software if there ISN'T any frigging software to run???

Again, this is the "Ivory Tower" thing. The principle of GNU is "software developed by software developers for software developers". The very GNU philosophy (which you quoted) makes that assumption. But the principle of open-source is "software developed for everyone to use" - open-source acknowledges that the user will generally *not* be a developer, nor should that assumption be made. Once you get out of the trap of thinking of yourself as the only target audience, you can consider non-developers having a stake in your code, which means you don't crap on them from a great height. Which is what HURD developers did to their fledgling userbase all those years ago.

Grab.

relax

[commodoresloat]

calm down, it's ok. Take the blue pill. you'll be fine. feeling better yet? here, sit down. take this mouse in your hand and look at the screen. I know there's only one button, just take it. now look at the screen. look at the soothing symmetrical widgets, and the icons sensibly located on the right side of the screen. See what I mean? feeling better now?

I thought so.

Now, what was it you wanted to say?

Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[commodoresloat]

Check out this analysis. The whole book is pretty good; I never looked at Dilbert in the same way after reading this.

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[essreenim]

No. F*** the content. I have no problem with ommitting certain depressing facts..I only have a problem with the corporate bedding..

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[MightyYar]

This is one of those pieces of writing that is becoming more common today - where a large part of the article is dedicated to some supposed grievous omission in a body of work. Can you imagine being judged on what you hadn't done? From the article:

Major Issues That Dilbert Rarely or Never Addresses, Although It Certainly Could:

Um, Dilbert is a comic strip. It is meant to be funny and it attacks some areas of interest to a specific niche of readers. If you think you can address other issues in a funny way, by all means write another comic strip!

Now, to pick apart his list of things he says are never addressed in Dilbert...

Export of jobs to cheap labor markets

Is this guy serious? Hello, Elbonia???? He has clearly not read much of the strip.

* Union-busing * Corporate Welfare * Repetitive stress injuries, exposure to chemicals and other work-related hazards

Oh yeah, those are really funny topics that the average geek encounters on a day-to-day basis.... HELLLO, Dilbert takes place in a cube-farm! There is no union in the average cube-farm environment, and when there is interaction it usually leads to a feeling that I would describe as PRO union-busting.

* Sexual harassment * The glass ceiling for women * Planned obsolescence

Again, he must not read the strip. Alice's character is there, I think, to humorously depict a woman's experience in a male bastion. Also, I think that they address planned obsolescence sufficently.

* Cost-benefit analysis defining a finite number of workplace injuries or deaths as acceptable * Pension fund fraud * Tax abatements and subsidies for unnecessary projects

Jeese... again, just not funny material here. Also, not something that most cube-dwellers will run into except in the newspaper.

* Blue-collar workers who actually make the stuff that Dilbert designs -- people who, incidentally, face many of the same problems he does, and with far less ability to do anything about it

Man, alive, this is not a "blue-collar" strip. Again, if this guy wants to make a new strip that targets a different audience, he is welcome to. I don't feel that it is a valid criticism to blame a comic strip, or even any other piece of literary or artistic work, for targeting the wrong audience. Try to restrict yourself to commenting on the content provided. Man, he only has three frames a day! I imagine this guy gets his panties in a bunch over Garfield because none of the characters has ever developed feline AIDS.

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[TwistedSquare]

* Cost-benefit analysis defining a finite number of workplace injuries or deaths as acceptable * Pension fund fraud * Tax abatements and subsidies for unnecessary projects

Jeese... again, just not funny material here. Also, not something that most cube-dwellers will run into except in the newspaper. Actually, I think the cost-benefit analysis one has been covered in previous strips - either Dogbert or the PHB were selling a dodgy product they knew could cause fatalities but didn't care.

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[jargoone]

I imagine this guy gets his panties in a bunch over Garfield because none of the characters has ever developed feline AIDS.

It's the leading killer of domestic cats!

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the guy's point is not to say Dilbert should address these things, but that by not addressing certain things, the strip betrays a certain politics. Which I think the guy would be fine with, if Dilbert did not pretend to be a sort of champion of the cubicle class. Whatever though; it is just a comic strip.

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is union busing? Is that free trips for senior citizens to the pipefitters?

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to hump Rachel Dratch in the worst possible way, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

(Not if she's doing Debbie Downer, though. That would just be too depressing. "I used to enjoy sex, before I found out I can't have children." WAAH-WAAAAAHHH!)

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[Random832]

And the point of the post you're responding to is that the things on the list that Dilbert _actually_ fails to address aren't relevant to the "cubicle class.", and those which are, are in fact addressed in Dilbert.

Re:First program

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, due to incompatibilities with the /bin/true program, the kernel has to be rewritten from scratch.

I just deleted Dilbert from my RSS reader

[Omni-Cognate]

It sure had jumped the shark, anyway. The last couple of weeks in particular have had some seriously lame strips. It's a shame. I'm going to miss it.

Re:I just deleted Dilbert from my RSS reader

[renderhead]

Funny... he's not going to miss you...

You're all a bunch of whiners. Either the strip is funny, or it's not. If it's not, don't read it and shut the hell up. Boycotting a strip that you're reading for free every day is not going to affect anything.

The site

[cmad_x]

Shouldn't the site be slightly updated, then? At least take the "this project is dead" part out. Go Hurd!

Re:The site

[yanestra]

Shouldn't the site be slightly updated, then? At least take the "this project is dead" part out. Go Hurd!

Hm, they should wait till they're absolutely sure that it's not dead.

Re:The site

[Anonymous Coward]

If that was the deal then all the hurd sites should say it's dead.

there is a research project to port darwin

[Anonymous Coward]

guess nobody bothered to g**gle it: New kernel for Darwin:

Apple's Darwin operating system is the open source base for Mac OS X. The underlying kernel is based on Mach. This project requires implementing a replacement for Mach based on the L4ka Pistachio kernel. Since ports of both exist on similar platforms (IA32 and PPC), most of this project will consist of building an emulation layer for Pistachio which can provide system call interfaces to match those provided by the existing kernel. In addition to implementation and testing, performance evaluation will be an important aspect of this project. Since part of the project is already done and the whole thing is quite large, an important aspect wiill be defining a doable subset, in conjuction with anyone doing part of it for BE. Starting early is advised on this project so no late applications will be considered.

Parent needs a glass hat

[QuietRiot]

It took Linux a long time to be recognized as a viable alternative to other Unices.

Your point? The world now knows there are viable alternatives, and they can be had for historical lows on price.

I don't think this can be easily done again.

The world's got practice. It's no longer in the same state it was in '91. Back at that time, very few people had unix machines on their desk or at home. Unix ran in the computer room at work or school and you connected to the system but did little in the way of administration. Millions have been introduced to "the unix-like way of life" (TULWOF), superuser status, and have developed desires to exploit the powers of their machines in an infinite number of ways. The world is primed to be wowed again.

I see our future selves laughing at our current fascination with Linux like we now look at time we spent with DOS. We'll see someday how horribly inflexible it was compared to what's coming in this next generation of operating systems. Your post shows you know very little about the Hurd and what possibilities it will allow. One cannot currently imagine all the fun things people are going to do with it (them?) X years from now.

And I doubt that Hurd would have any noticeable advantages over Linux.

Exactly not the case. There are *profound* advantages [to "the Hurd"].

If and when a usable system comes to fruition is the question. Developers. Developers. Developers. Get them excited and you'll soon be doing things with your machine you'll never even have considered possible. Maybe not yourself, but people will be doing things they never dreamt possible. There are fundamental differences that are difficult to comprehend having experienced only monolithics. Granted, most of the advantages are not so much at the user level, but from a system administration perspective. Guys working "in the computer room" will probably have much more to be excited about than somebody with a user account. If you know what "having root" is like, the possibilities coming with the Hurd's architecture will be much more meaningful than they would to a typical user. However "typical user accounts" will be much more powerful on a box running the Hurd. Even low level stuff like filesystems floats up into "userland" allowing you the ability to customize your environment to great extents without affecting other users on the same machine.

So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts ...

Maybe more people should work on the current telephone system instead of wasting their time with VoIP. Maybe you should have worked harder at your old job instead of trying to find a new, better job? The Hurd is to Linux users like Linux is to DOS users. If Linux (as currently implemented) lives in N-space, the Hurd lives in N+1.

Resources get split up; sure. Consider however how the body of developers grows every day as more and more are introduced to TULWOF. None of us get to justify or dictate how others spend their free time. Get excited about the underdog. Linux has enough developers, don't you think? Will developments made on a new system with completely different rules positively effect Mr. Torvalds pet project? Most certainly I presume. I see the relationship as symbiotic. The Hurd takes on the huge body of software that has been developed due to "the Linux revolution" of the last decade and Linux takes from the Hurd (besides the jealousy that I can only predict will develop eventually) new techniques and perhaps, somehow, some type of hybrid approach to the kernel. There's no telling really; I can only imagine good things coming to both camps. Your attitude of discouraging work on such projects, done freely by others, I see as sel

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice that despite the length of the reply, and don't get me wrong it was inspirinng and well written, you still couldn't tell him any actual advantage of hurd over linux. There were lots of "it's really great", but no followup of 'because'.

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[Panaflex]

Dude!

These guys have already FINISHED their GNU/Hurd implementation. The only limit is yourself!

-Pan

Sound required to understand

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[XO]

HURD is a rekindling of a Unix kernel. It's microkernel design basically brings us back to MACH/BSD, which .. oh.. hmm.. nextstations were what, 1989, 1990?

*yawn*

Redoing the same thing in a different way just yields us the same thing. Get it?

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[bonch]

Your point? The world now knows there are viable alternatives, and they can be had for historical lows on price.

"The world?" I assume by that phrase, you're referring to the geek development community. Your implication is that said community didn't know about viable alternatives before, which is balogna--UNIX has been around for a long damn time, and in the meantime there has been OS/2, BeOS, NeXTStep, BSD, etc.

The mainstream world still has no clue about Linux. The mainstream hype of Linux reached a fervor around 1999 and died out. Linux is just one of many choices out there for hardcore geeks and server admins, but not "the world."

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[QuietRiot]

HURD is a rekindling of a Unix kernel. It's microkernel design basically brings us back to MACH/BSD, which .. oh.. hmm.. nextstations were what, 1989, 1990?

*yawn*


You see Apple yawning?

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers. Developers. Developers.

BLLLEEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!! Aiiiieeeeeeee!!!! Whooooo!!!

(Reference for the confused)

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[Anonymous Coward]

It's microkernel design basically brings us back to MACH/BSD, which .. oh.. hmm.. nextstations were what, 1989, 1990?

And monolithic Unixlike kernels are what, 1971, 1972?

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I see our future selves laughing at our current fascination with Linux like we now look at time we spent with DOS. We'll see someday how horribly inflexible it was compared to what's coming in this next generation of operating systems.
----------

It exists, it's called BSD.

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[XO]

Apple doesn't bring us anything new to the table, all it brings us is a bunch of people who became fanatics. (oh, wait, i guess we're all fanatics, since we're at slashdot)

Re:Parent needs a glass hat

[lostguy]

NeXTSTEP used monolithic Mach, not microkernel Mach.

As demonstrated by fifteen-year-olds around the world, ignorance yields boredom. :-)

What's next? Duke Nukem Forever release upcomming?

[Anonymous Coward]

A 15-years-and-counting-delay in delivery. Hurd must be exceptionaly better than Linux if it wants to gain even a minimal market share. I would bet that even OpenSolaris10 will find more users.

Coral Cache Link

[wikinerd]

Coral Cache Link

Why Multics went under

[mangu]

I don' really know why Multics went under, it was fun to use.

That story has been told I don't know how many times. Multics went under for the same reason HURD never took off. It was aimed too high for the resources available. When it became evident that nothing was going to come out of it in a reasonable time frame, Bell Labs got out of the project and that was why Unix was born. Nearly the same thing happened in the HURD/Linux story, the main difference is that Multics/Unix were commercial projects done by big corporations.

Looking with the benefit of hindsight, I'm willing to predict that HURD may become a viable OS, but it will never be very popular. It has been in existence for so long that it seems unlikely that it will gather momentum now. It may have some advantages, but it doesn't seem to be solving any pressing problem. Its defenders claim it has more stability, security, and flexibility than other systems, but these do not seem to be big problems with either Linux or OSX, so why switch?

Re:Why Multics went under

[ehack]

Actually, Multics was deployed commercially, I used it at a university site and it was amazing how well it worked compared to the IBM timesharing systems that were the alternative then in scientific computation (no Vaxen at that time). I think there were some commercial issues rather, the system was mature and deployed.

Re:Why Multics went under

[Anonymous Coward]

Its defenders claim it has more stability, security, and flexibility than other systems, but these do not seem to be big problems with either Linux or OSX, so why switch?

You're wrong. Stability and security are big problems with all systems. If (IF) you can get a measurable improvement then that is always a big deal.

Re:Why Multics went under

[LWATCDR]

Yes a few Multics where deployed. It was not a big hit for a few reasons.
1. The computer systems that it was desgined around never really took off.
2. It was huge, complex, and late.
3. Other OSs and computer systems where good enough.
So when do we see FreeMultics?

Shouldn't That Be BSD/HURD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it important to recognize the important contributions the BSD team has made to the project?

obligatory

[tuggy]

yes but... does it run linux? :P

If I Only Had A Hurd

[Anonymous Coward]

If I Only Had A Hurd
(The Wizard of Oz: If I Only Had...)

If the Hacker Gods beside me
Would graciously abide me
And let my wish be heard:
That I would consider shaving
I might even start behaving
If I only had a Hurd

Oh, I could tell you why
Open Source is too pragmatic and impure
Tell you things you've heard a million times before
And then I'd sit and write some more:

I'd make fun of the internals
Of monolithic kernels
Old-fashioned and absurd
Since they don't put "Gnu" before it
I'd prefer to just ignore it
If I only had a Hurd

I could maybe have a relapse
And do some work on Emacs
To make a brave Gnu/Word
I would write some manifestos
Clad in flamewar-proof asbestos
If I only had a Hurd

-----
The text is in the public domain. No offense, honestly :)

You forgot one:

[Interfacer]

All your GNU are belong to us

Re:You forgot one:

[stinerman]

And perhaps "GNU Hurd will be available in 2006 ... except in Nebraska".

That is, if that one will ever catch on.

Re:You forgot one:

[Anonymous Coward]

It will... in Japan.

How is all this very different from a GRID

[essreenim]

22 years ago we didn't have the vast potential of distributed vomputing. Are we not living in the past with HURD?

What is the difference between a cluster of systems all running Linux.( because its a cluster you can "pretend" each node is a microkernel process of the overall O.S - grid ) and using HURD?

How would a network of HURD machines compare to the most modern mainframes and grids that we have now. I'm interested to be educated on this matter

To R.Stallman....

[cttforsale]

Thanks for the kernel...

MirrorDot Cache Link

[wikinerd]

MirrorDot Cache Link

yep ;)

[agent dero]

Yes, actually.

;)

I piss on all licences equally

[essreenim]

I'm not sure about all this "free is the only way" GPL anymore. I'm right now on the verge of making a big decision of switching from Linux over to Open Solaris or something. I just want to work and delop on and for an OS without any political crap. Im getting tired of all this neo-freedom-fascism.

You know, being intolerant of tolerance is not a good thing. I like freedom in software, but I also like to smoke weed every now and then. I'm not perfect and there is no perfect licence or model out there. Heck ,I'll miss using Slackware if I go and start usin Solaris, but screw it, I might just do it.

Re:I piss on all licences equally

[Abalamahalamatandra]

If you switch to OpenSolaris, just remember that it's only as "open" as Sun wants it to be, and that it wouldn't be open at all if it weren't for "all this neo-freedom-fascism".

The only reason there (supposedly will be) code to look at in Solaris is because that's the only way it has a prayer of competing with Linux. It still won't compete, though, because Sun chose to make sure that the licenses are such that they can take, take, take, but not give back to GPL projects.

Re:I piss on all licences equally

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic but programming high is kinda fun, trust me I did a bunch back in college.

Drivers?

[shish]

Any chance of them being able to hack something together so linux driver modules can be loaded?

Copyrights are a double-edged sword

[Colonel Cholling]

Those who think it's evil to advocate the enforcement of copyrights on commercial software should bear in mind that it is this same copyright law which is at the center of IBM's defence against SCO, which, if you need a reminder, is not "Copyrights are evil, man, and SCO needs to like, chill out and let it be free," but "Linux was copyrighted according to the GPL, and SCO violated those terms."

You can't apply copyright law only to those things which you, personally, want copyrighted.

Re:Copyrights are a double-edged sword

[Anonymous Coward]

If there were no copyrights, there would be no IBM/SCO case.

Furthermore, no matter what one thinks about copyrights, the reasons why one supports something are important, not just the outcome. There is no inconsistency between complaining about Adams being a "BSA whore" and still being for copyright enforcement.

Re:Copyrights are a double-edged sword

[SilverspurG]

Linux was copyrighted according to the GPL

I think the spirit of GPL is "anti-copyright".

The whole part about redistributing modifications, providing source code, and not charging come off as guidelines on playing fair and being nice.

I fully support legal action against people who infringe the GPL but, if the system were absent of a legal recognition of copyright, GPL infringers would be at worse risk of being permanently taken offline by the Tai Chi and Kung Fu GNU monks who police the networked planet.

Linux Driver Portability

[Ryan Huddleston]

Can't Linux drivers be ported to the HURD?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but due to their shared GPLv2 license, the below-mentioned "huge amount of embecded knowledge on how PC hardware works buried in the Linux code" can be leveraged for use in the HURD. This could be a boon for HURD development, because unlike the other Free OS Linux compatibility modes, the HURD can lift such code straight from the Linux kernel, giving it a significant advantage in that matter over others.

Maybe with a little work even proprietary drivers like NVidia and ATI drivers could be made to work. That would give it the huge advantage of being one of 3 Free OSs that has accellerated modern 3D hardware

Re:Linux Driver Portability

[nofx_3]

I would guess that this would make things difficult. I'm not a kernel hacker but I would think that the API would be different so it would not be a simple matter of just lifting the driver code out of Linux. Secondly, I would also guess that the architecture (Monolithic vs. Microkernel) would call for some major differences in how hardware drivers are handled. I do think the writers of new drivers for HURD will benefit greatly from at least being able to look at the linux drivers and get an idea of the hardware interface.

My guess is that driver support for HURD will be slow going at this point. The reason being that HURD has a much smaller user base that a kernel like Linux, and its likely that only hardware that the few devs are using will have drivers for it in the near future.

-kaplanfx

Re:Linux Driver Portability

[forlornhope]

Yes, there is a research proposal on the subject of creating a compatibility layer to run Linux drivers directly in HURD user-space. They are actually thinking about making that the default or using OS-kit or making their own driver infrustructure. I think in the end youll see both the Linux drivers and the OS-kit drivers with OS-kit being the perfered. But this is all from memory and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Well...um

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn

Statistics from my slashdotted site

[wikinerd]

I get these statistics from the slashdotting of my site:

Operating Systems:
67% Windows (45.6% WinXP, 14.4% Win2000, 2.6% Win98, 1.8% Win2003, 1.3% WinNT, 0.6% WinME, 0.2% Win95)
21% GNU/Linux
6% Macintosh (5.6% MacOS-X, 0.4% MacOS old)
1% FreeBSD
0.5% Sun Solaris
0.00001% AIX (wh00t!!)
0.00000001% NetBSD

Web Browsers:
44% Mozilla Firefox (39.3% Firefox 1.0, 2.2% Firefox 0.10.1, 0.8% Firefox 0.9.3, 0.4% Firefox 0.8)
33% Microsoft Internet Explorer (30.2% ie6, 1.4% ie5.5, 0.6% ie5)
9% Mozilla (Suite)
3.5% Safari
1.7% Konqueror (I use this)
1.7% Opera
1.4% Netscape (0.3% Netscape 7.1, 0.3% Netscape 4.0, 0.2% Netscape 7.2,
0.9% Galeon
0.4% Camino
0.2% MultiZilla
0.2% K-Meleon
0.1% Links (textbrowser)
0.00001% Lotus Notes web client (wh00t!!)
0.000001% Lynx (textbrowser)

My explanation of the statistics:

Slashdotters mainly use Windows and GNU/Linux. Some of them use a Mac. There are small percentages of slashdotters who use FreeBSD and Solaris. Very few brave adventurous slashdotters run IBM AIX and NetBSD.

Windows slashdotters use primarily the WinXP version, but also Win2000. Some of them still use the good old Win98. Some brave slashdotters use Win2003.

Slashdotters primarily use the Firefox Web browser, but some of them still use MSIE. Some slashdotters prefer Mozilla and few of them run Safari and Konqueror. Few brave slashdotters use textbrowsers or even Lotus Notes as a web browser. There are still slashdotters who run Netscape 4, and some Firefox slashdotters who haven't upgraded to 1.0.

It is interesting to note that not all Mac-loving slashdotters (6%) use Safari (3.5%).

and BTW my site slashdotted, so better use a cache service to see it:
Coral Cache
MirrorDot
Many hanks to the people who run these cache services.

if you enjoyed this story please keep the wikinerds.org on your bookmarks. Thanks :)

Re:Statistics from my slashdotted site

[zoomba]

So basically you're saying that All Slashdotters use Operating System XYZ and Browser ABC, except for when they don't. :P

Your statistics have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yes, we use computers and web browsers to view web sites.

Bravo :)

Re:Statistics from my slashdotted site

[Anonymous Coward]

That explanation is worthless and tells nothing more than the actual data.

Re:Statistics from my slashdotted site

[mrseigen]

Safari is, how shall I put it? Feature-lacking. It has no "ignore popups from x" feature, there's no clean way to disable hacked-in extensions (like PithHelmet).

Re:Statistics from my slashdotted site

[wikinerd]

Updated statistics: 33% of slashdot readers use GNU/Linux, and 60% use Mozilla Firefox.

Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[amightywind]

It has always been a mystery to me that so many difficult problems have been solved by so many brilliant GNU teams (gas, gcc, gdb, gld, bfd, glibc, emacs, m4, grub, bash ...) that developing a good kernel has eluded them. The people that have developed these packages are certainly skilled enough. They have also demonstrated tremendous drive. Any ideas?

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[dougmc]

The people that have developed these packages are certainly skilled enough. They have also demonstrated tremendous drive. Any ideas?

Ultimately, people either write things that they need, or stuff they're interested in. In the case of the Hurd, Linux and 386BSD (and then the other *BSDs later) removed much of the need for a `GNU kernel', so it probably mostly left people who were working on it just because it was interesting.

And many of those packages that you've mentioned are a lot simpler than a *nix-like kernel, and so it's easier to `get your arms around them' and contribute.

Hasn't RMS referred to Linux as the `missing' `GNU kernel'? Around the time of the `lignux' fiasco?

In any event, I see the Hurd as something of an experiment in making a new kernel not because it's needed, but because you can. Linux was in the same boat many years ago, but it became extremely useful pretty quickly. The last I'd heard, the Hurd was reaching the useful stage too, but now that I hear that they've started from scratch, well, I guess it'll be a while.

In any event, had Linux and the *BSDs not come around when they did, we could all very well be singing the praises of the Hurd on Slashdot now, talking about how it's so much better than the OS/2 that had monopolized the PC OS market ...

(OS/2 was a very worthy OS, but it just never really caught on. It seemed appropriate to throw it into my bizarro world ...)

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[ckaminski]

OS/2 never caught on because Microsoft kept promising Windows 4.0 in 93. Um, 94. Um 95. Wait! We really mean it this time.

That an an insane marketing campaign around OS/2 Warp that didn't make any sense. Warp as in the hippy twisted sense as opposed to Warp as in makes your computer go fast sense...

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[jonbryce]

A big difference between linux and hurd is that Linus set out to hack something together that would work, based on tried and tested technologies - (ie a monolithic kernel).

The hurd developers on the other hand set out to create something that is better than anything that has ever been developed before.

When you consider that, it is not hard understand why linux is one of the more popular mainstream kernels out there, whereas hurd still isn't ready for serious use.

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[dougmc]

OS/2 never caught on because Microsoft kept promising Windows

No, OS/2 never caught on because the applications weren't there. Sure, OS/2 2.0 ran Windows 3.0 applications, in many cases better than Windows did, but in other cases they wouldn't work at all or had issues. And it couldn't run Windows 3.1 applications, at least not until a later version of OS/2.

If you had a native OS/2 application, it was almost certain to be better than a native Windows application on Windows. But these applications were few and far in between, and so OS/2 had to emulate Windows to run Windows applications, and that was less than perfect. People didn't really properly appreciate OS/2's advantages -- they just wanted something that would give them less trouble -- so they'd take their PS/2 that came preinstalled with OS/2, and replace it with Windows.

Linux is in a similar position, except that it's not as good at emulating Windows as OS/2 was. (Well, emulating Windows was much easier back then. Wine can probably run Windows 3.x applications as well as or better than OS/2 2.1 did.)

As for the Hurd, there's a lot of potential there, but the rest of the computing world isn't just waiting around for the Hurd to finally be finished. As said by another poster, the goal of the Hurd is to be better than anything else out there -- which is great, but if the new version just ran it's first program, it's a long way from catching up to anything, let alone surpassing it.

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[Stanistani]

When I first heard of the OS/2 Warp campaign, I thought they said "Whorf." "Great", I thought, "an OS for the Klingon Warrior in all of us. We nerds shall snap it up!"

Then I saw the box... and knew it was doomed.

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nonsense. Plenty of people have made successful microkernel based systems in the time between when the HURD was started and now. No, the HURD hasn't had the success of Linux mainly becuase of differences in internal politics in the two projects as well as massive differences in the amount of resources available.

Re:Why has a GNU kernel been so elusive?

[Bas_Wijnen]

No, it was indeed something that was never done before, and it still isn't done anywhere else, as far as I know. What we're doing is not just using a microkernel as the basis of the OS, but making the OS consist of a collection of mutually untrusting servers.

All other microkernel approaches have a load of servers (or even just one) which all run as "root" and just trust each other. Of course there is some trust by the Hurd servers, but not more than needed.

This is supposed to enhance security and stability, although only The Real World(tm) can show if that is significant, or even true at all.

forgot another one

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our gnu overlords

15 years of work...

[Tassach]

... and they just got "Hello, World" to run.

That's got to be some kind of record.

Re:15 years of work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, when I'm porting an RTOS to a new platform or board, the most difficult program to get running _is_ the "Hello, World" one. Once I get that running, it's all good.

Not kidding.

Also

[auximini]

"I, for one, welcome our GNU/Hurd Overlords"

Cue sound of crickets and one person clapping...

[Evil Pete]

Yeah this is a milestone. Or is that a millstone.

Congratulations. Yawn. Due to the staggering delay between project start and minimal system, I think there will be a stunning lack of emotion until we see something friggin spectacular!

Interesting

[petrus4]

I find myself wondering what this will mean for Linux. Will there actually be something of a community split (at least initially) with people going off and trying the HURD? Obviously the "ready for the desktop" lemmings won't be among that crowd, but I'm still guessing there'll be a fair number of adventurous souls wanting to try it out once it's a bit more workable.

Re:Interesting

[Lord Bitman]

those people have more than six computers in their homes.

No.

[Ayanami Rei]

The kernel is not implemented as true microkernel. There is seperation, but the message passing is limited to IO request packets that are sent to and from the HAL from (properly written) drivers. The drivers run in the same thread but in a different execution context / ring (IIRC through a "door").
But drivers that require "fast IO" are running in the same address space as the kernel.
So while the IORP-using drivers shouldn't be able to take the system down, I wouldn't call it a microkernel exactly.

i always liked...

[caveat]

With IRIX, a T-1000 shoots you in the foot. Then a T-Rex bites it off.

With UNICOS, you shoot yourself in the foot with an MP-5.

1st program?

[newandyh-r]

... and I was expecting "Hello world!"

Re:1st program?

[Erik Hensema]

Actuall it was banner and judging from the large exlamation mark on the screenshot, I think it was Hello World! :-)

Re:1st program?

[EvilAlien]

how... exciting for them.

Why is the development pace of GNU/HURD so damn pathetic? I'd expect more progress out of 1 person working on a project like this for 15 years...

Still waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in College when Hurd started. I had hoped it would be a viable alternative to Unix - i.e. free and with any luck better. Since then I have watched other OS's born, raised and retired. I can remember 10 years ago Plan-9 was a big deal. BSD, Mach, OS-9, OS-X, TOS, VMS, MVS, Irix, list goes on and on.

At the rate they are going, I'll retire before it is ready. I think I'll stick with Linux and my Atari 800 Unix loaded from casette.

Kernel port?

[slapout]

new OS kernel called HURD ... using the GNU Mach microkernel.

HURD-Mach was able to run a GUI and a browser, the developers decided to start from scratch and port the project to the high-performance L4 microkernel.

Ok, I'm confused. HURD is a kernel. L4 is a kernel. How do you port a kernel to a kernel?

Re:Kernel port?

[wikinerd]

An operating system kernel can initialise processes, grant access to file system, has some basic network protocol support et cetera. A microkernel has nothing, it can just initialise processes. GNU Mach is a microkernel. L4 is also a microkernel.

HURD is a collection of software servers running on top of a microkernel. HURD/Mach is just HURD running over the GNU Mach microkernel. HURD/L4 is a port of HURD to the L4 microkernel.

FYI the Linux kernel has also been ported to L4 and it is called L4Linux.

The Hurd formula

[tobiasly]

1. Release a kernel 10 years after the Linux boom started which will never be used by anyone besides a few RMS fanboys and Free purists.

2. ????

3. Profit!

motivation matters

[jeif1k]

Yes, the BSA is making sure copyrights are respected, and that indirectly helps the open source licenses. But the BSA has been hostile to open source, and the more open source catches on, the more power the BSA loses.

The Dilbert cartoon does make one wonder about Scott Adam's attitudes towards issues of copyrights and freedom, and that is a justifiable reason to criticize him if it is true. That he indirectly and accidentally may or may not have a short-term positive effect on open source licenses doesn't matter.

Re:motivation matters

[Anonymous Coward]

. But the BSA has been hostile to open source, and the more open source catches on, the more power the BSA loses.

Proof?

What's next?

[UnknowingFool]

First DOOM3 and Halo2 come out. Then the Red Sox win the World Series. Now HURD is about to reach a major milestone. Has someone called Hell to see if they are snowed under?

before G5 PB?

[kex]

Does this mean GNU/HURD will be available before my powerbook G5? It's coming out next tuesday, you just wait!

GNU/HURD....

[smash]

However, when HURD-Mach was able to run a GUI and a browser, the developers decided to start from scratch and port the project to the high-performance L4 microkernel. As a result development was slowed by years, but now HURD developer Marcus Brinkmann made a historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4. He says: 'We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!'"

[sarcasm]GNU Software: It works! Fuck, lets re-write it before people find some sort of use for it![/sarcasm]

I know HURD must be more of a research project than anything else - otherwise they'd be trying to get something at least usable to arouse some interest in the project.

I admire what HURD attempts to achieve, but at the moment its a bit of an incomplete solution to a non-problem (find an open-source kernel for the GNU operating environment)....

smash.

To Intel engineers/who's interested

[master_p]

Microkernels would be helped tremendously if 80x86 CPUs did not only have rings but also regions...because a faulty driver can write to anything inside its ring and lower-priviliged rings.

The ring protection should have been inside the page table. A page descriptor has enough room for that. It should have been like this:

Page Descriptor with Ring Protection:

bit 0: page present/missing
bits 1-3: other
bits 4-5: current ring
bits 6-7: Read ring
bits 8-9: Write ring
bits 10-11: eXecute ring
bits 12-31: page frame

So in order for some piece of code in a certain page A to read from another page B, it should be that A.page_ring = A.read_ring. The same goes for write and execute access.

This mechanism has many advantages over the current one:

a) ring protection is per page and not per segment. Segments become totally irrelevant for protection.

b) there is no need for ring gates. A process in ring 3 can execute code of ring 0 if the kernel page allows it. There is also no need for special instructions like 'syscall'.

c) higher-privileged code can have const data be read from lower-privileged code.

d) device drivers can easily be isolated from the kernel.

e) there is no need for special 'virus' protectiobn bit, since executable code can have write ring set to 0 and execute ring to 3 (which means an application can not execute data).

Re:To Intel engineers/who's interested

[Bas_Wijnen]

Am I misunderstanding you, or do you propose to update these values (one record per page, quite a lot I would say) on every context switch?

I also fail to see why microkernels would be helped by this, as I think L4 allows all the things you want (in a technically different way, but who cares).

Re:To Intel engineers/who's interested

[master_p]

No, there is no need to update these values on each context switch. Since switching contexts also switches the Page Descriptor Table, I am simply proposing a new protection architecture that would make for a better protection model, as well as speed up execution of intra-ring code.

What can be expected?

[beforewisdom]

Can GLX fans expect to see a usuable GNU/Hurd distro before the next full release of Debian?

Is this like ...

[Anonymous Coward]

First man landed on the moon?

timely

[iggymanz]

These microkernels running services make much more sense on a processor with multiple cores - the main problem on a traditional "single-threaded" processor is there is way too much OS overhead 25-30% with the microkernel strategy, compared to a monolithic kernel. So in 5 to 10 years, as the HURD moves forward galacially like the plot to Dr. Who, this will be a good foundation for the new generation of processors.

Re:timely

[cnettel]

Even a microkernel will suffer if you have frequent calls between cores. A context switch on the waiting core is just as expensive as it's always been, but you may lower the total amount of needed switches a little.

Also, unless both cores have a completely shared cache architecture, you don't want to break that locality in each and every system call.

Re:timely

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed!

I'm believe that with dual-core processors, microkernels can be faster than monolithic kernels at least by the same factor they are slower now

Hurd/Linux/etc

[XO]

Wasn't it back in about 1991ish, when Linus still thought that Linux wasn't going to be anything special, that Linus said "maybe in the next year or so HURD will become useful", or something similar to those lines? implying that HURD would displace any usefulness of Linux.. hmm.. my my my how things have changed.

Aside from academics is there any reason whatsoever that anyone on earth would ever want to attempt to operate this?

Re:Hurd/Linux/etc

[wikinerd]

"Aside from academics is there any reason whatsoever that anyone on earth would ever want to attempt to operate this?" My answer

What do I care what GNU HURD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got no secrets from a GNU. Classic joke from a big blue joke book when I was a kid circa 1972 City Slicker: That's a great group of cows Farmer: Herd. City Slicker: Huh? Farmer: Herd. A cow "herd" City Slicker: What do I care what a cow heard? I've got no secrets from a cow!

Maybe I'll switch to GNU/HURD...

[Anonymous Coward]

when I can run windows apps on it... will they have something like WINE?
I mean GNU/WINE, of course.

A kernel unencumbered by IP problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a kernel unencumbered by intellectual property disputes may be what is required at this stage in OS development. How many organisations and companies are holding back with their Linux deployment because of nagging doubts about intellectual property in the Linux kernel? It's just possible SCO might get away with some stuff.

People on /. have previously been talking about IBM looking at *BSD as an alternative to Linux, just in case things get hairy with Linux. Having the HURD as another option can't hurt.

A whole lotta diversitty

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah ... we got HURD, Linux, BSD the diversity is amaizing? But how much market share do theese OS-es have? 5%?

Re:A whole lotta diversitty

[mirko]

There's more people using these nowadays than there were people having a computer at home 22 years ago so there are more home hackers NOW.

Re:Dilbert meets Marx

[pkalkul]

There is a interesting little book called "The trouble with Dilbert : how corporate culture gets the last laugh," by Norman Solomon that is an extended polemic on the ways in which Scott Adams has allegedly become a tool for the corporate overlords. The basic argument is that by making slightly-but-not-too subversive cracks at modern corporate life Dilbert defuses potentially revolutionary worker resentment. We all recognize our own feelings of helplessness, laugh a little, feel as if we are "sticking to the man" by posting our favorite PHB cartoon on the cubicle wall, and then go on with life without ever substantially challenging the structures of modern capitalism.

It's Dilbert meets Marx. Fun stuff.

donate money

[sleepingsquirrel]

And if you're really inclined to help the Hurd along, and have more money than hack time, you could always make adonation.

GET OUT

[Anonymous Coward]

and don't come back.

Initialization

[StormReaver]

"...which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4."

And in another fifteen years, they'll finish the code that allows them to stop that program.

Confused

[bonch]

I keep re-reading your post, and I'm still no less confused.

Based on your words, you are saying:

1.) You don't want your drivers to be able to restart when they "crap out." This means you want the whole kernel to die instead?

2.) You say the drivers are buggy and take the whole house down, requiring fixing. You prefer the whole house to be taken down rather than just restarting the driver in userspace to stay running?

3.) You talk about buggy, closed-source drivers right after you've already said open source drivers are buggy and take the whole house down. So what's the difference?

4.) You argue against a fixed driver interface like every other modern operating system has, allowing for both open source and commercial driver development (that whole choice thing, right?). Your only supporting evidence appears to be that "Linus is against it." Linus is not a perfect developer whose words should always be followed.

Re:Confused

[jaoswald]

He's saying that he wants drivers that don't crash, but microkernels that allow crashing drivers to "just be restarted" lead to a permissive atmosphere, in which driver writers don't care if their drivers crash or not.

His contention is that in a situation where a crashing driver kills everything, driver writers are much more careful, and crashing drivers are not accepted by users.

Re:Confused

[arose]

Now replace "driver" with "end user program" or "pre-alpha software" and read it again...

Linux Kernel & Microkernels

[zoloto]

What if we started taking development for 2.8 in the direction of microkernel functionality without making it a microkernel? Say we just coded in the difference, where modules are run in userspace instead of kernel space while keeping a "protected memory space" of the filesystem, hard drive, and other other driver modules (as an option of course). We can do this so that if hardware failure happens it can be restarted, we also can recover the hd/fs in case that goes and if a module decides to crash (as if a module has cognitive ability to do so) it won't take out the kernel.

I'm not a kernel programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but just how possible is this? Meaning, is it feasable to do this within the timeframe of any 2.8 or even 3.0 kernel development, and what would we have to do to make it this way?

I personally don't like any driver taking out my whole system, nor do I like having to reboot just because I upgraded or compiled and installed a newer driver/module. (sometimes it happens)

Help me out here fellas

Don't worry, Linux fans---

[einhverfr]

Hurd will never be big and professional like Linux ;-)

"mafia tactics"

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are not "mafia tactics." Like references to Nazis, references to the mafia are overdone, overexaggerated, emotive, and inaccurate. Debate on merits, not emotive connotations.

Re:"mafia tactics"

[cvdwl]

"Mafia tactics": you pay us or we hurt you physically.

BSA tactics: you pay them or we hurt you financially.

Yes, the BSA is enforcing legal licenses (albeit, IMHO, draconian, and legal only under our current business-subservient patent system), but otherwise it really is the same thing. The mafia provided a service; a group of thugs wouldn't drop by and ruin your business. The BSA prevents a group of lawyers from stopping by and ruining your business.

The cost of litigation, even when you are in the right, is a far more dangerous weapon, in this business climate, than a baseball bat. A lawyer can impoverish you for years, a baseball bat is likely just to involve some transient pain and medical expenses.

Hey, Genius

[adiposity]

Believe it then. Already done.

-Dan

And would it be possible...

[Spy der Mann]

to have a wide addoption of GNU/HURD as a Desktop OS? From what you say, it sounds like the dream OS - at least regarding security and stability - to me.

Before this, well it was just out of the radar, but now... I'm starting to think that maybe in some years, there could be a viable alternative to Windows AND Linux.

What do you think ppl?

MenuetOS

[narl]

..which also fits uncompressed on a floppy disk, and supports just about every core function you could require in an OS.....

Well, I was intrigued enough to load it onto a floppy and give it a try.

It's pretty cool that you get a such a responsive and slick GUI running off a floppy.

I think all it needs to be of some minimal use is a half-decent web browser. They had some testing browser that can load the text of webpages (but no images), but I didn't see that even hyperlinks worked in it. I gave their telnet client a try too, but had no luck interacting through it, although it seemed to connect.

If they could get a nice browser running on it, it'd be great to use for cheap web kiosks.

I wonder how hard it would be to port something to it.

Re:Let's see here - OSX & L4

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see Apple making any changes to this in the immediate future.

- But the whole thing about layers is that they can be swapped in and out.

I think that if there was a good enough reason, porting from the MACH microkernel to the L4 microkernel could be done without breaking too much.

And higher level software could run without noticing the difference.

I have seen from elsewhere that Apple is interested in Kernel development.

Although rewrites of the lower level items would not be worthwhile unless it lead to some significant gains.

Will Apple be running the L4 kernel in 10 years time ? - Who knows - it's possible.

One thing is certain - and that's that software development never stands still for long.

I guess if they spent 20 odd years working on this
then they though it worthwhile...

Switching from one MicroKernel to another is easier then switching from monolythic to microkernel.

OSX's microkernel is already very good, (and improving) along with improvements to MACH,
- So it would be interesting to see what speed differences there really were.

And whether this was a viable future direction.

Certainly the answer to that question at the moment is NO.

-- What OS we we be using in 20 years, 50 years, 100 years time ?

One answer is that it will be Microkernel based
- Other details may differ...
- Certainly parallel processing will be involved
- Only lower speed CPU's will use electronics...

It's quite possible that either way some lessons may be learnt for L4 developments, and that has to be a good thing.

"The dinner is prepared!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad everyone already had takeaway Linux.

Can't anybody over there write an OS?

[Animats]

These guys started with L4, which been used to run a modified Linux for years. About a half dozen other operating systems have been ported to run on top of L4. So it's not that big a deal.

The Hurd website, wiki, etc. haven't been updated in years.

At a more fundamental level, there's a design disaster in the making here. L4 seems to make the same mistake Mach made with interprocess communication - unidirectional IPC. This design error is called "what you want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation". This is a crucial design decision. Botch this and your microkernel performance will suck.

QNX gets it right - the basic message-passing primitive is MsgSend, which sends a message and blocks until a reply is received (or a timeout occurs). The implementation immediately transfers control to the destination process (assuming it's waiting for a message), without a trip through the scheduler. That's crucial to getting good performance on real work from a microkernel.

Mach botched this. Mach IPC is pipe-like, with one-way transmission. And that's a major reason Mach was a flop. (Note that the version of Mach used for the MacOS isn't the final "pure Mach", it's a Berkeley BSD UNIX kernel with Mach extensions.)

Why does this matter so much? Because if send doesn't block, when you send, control continues in the sending process. Later, presumably, the sending process blocks waiting for a reply. But who runs next? Whoever was ready to run next. If you're CPU-bound and there are processes ready to run, every time you do a message pass, you lose your turn and your quantum, and have to wait. So programs with extensive IPC activity grind to a crawl on a loaded system.

But if message passing is tightly integrated with scheduling, a message pass doesn't hurt your thread's CPU access. Control continues in the new process with the same quantum (and in QNX, the same priority by default, which avoids priority inversions in real time work). Now message passing is only slightly more expensive than a subroutine call, and can be used for everything.

There is a big literature about Mach, Minix and related underperforming academic microkernels, while the key architectural details of the commercial microkernels that work (basically QNX and IBM's VM) aren't well publicized. But you can dig the information out if you work at it.

That is working?

[jaoswald]

Can someone explain to me how to interpret the screenshot as a successful execution of anything?

It looks like a spew of debugging messages, with a few blobs of # symbols.

Are those blobs supposed to be part of the banner output? I don't get it.

L4Ka::Pistachio is BSD not GPL

[The Wookie]

From what I can tell, this Hurd port was using the L4Ka::Pistachio kernel, which is licensed as BSD and not GPL. I am surprised that GNU would go for that.

Re:L4Ka::Pistachio is BSD not GPL

[cpghost]

I am surprised that GNU would go for that.

Why are you surprised? Was Mach released under GPL?

The point here is that everything written on top of L4Ka::Pistachio for the Hurd/L4 project is GPLed. So, me thinks, it's still GNU compliant enough.

Re:L4Ka::Pistachio is BSD not GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU have no qualms about taking BSD code. They don't even give credit most of the time.

Rocky Horror

[satsuke]

Did anyone else take that last statement as being some sort of reference to The Rocky Horror Picture Show that I missed the meaning of?

Magenta sounding a gong

Magenta: "Master, dinner is prepared!"
Frankenfurter: "Excellent. Under the circumstances. Formal dress, is to be optional"

As I demonstrate that I've seen that movie may to many f'king times, AND IT KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER EVERY TIME I SEE IT"

Re:Rocky Horror

[svetlin]

A biblical reference:

Matthew 22:4 (New King James Version)
Again, he sent out other servants, saying, "Tell those who are invited, "See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed, and all things are ready. Come to the wedding."

Re:Rocky Horror

[satsuke]

they were either paraphrasing the line you mentioned, or it's neither .. either way, I don't see how a religious comment got mixed in there

Viable Alternatives

[QuietRiot]

"The world?" I assume by that phrase, you're referring to the geek development community. Your implication is that said community didn't know about viable alternatives before, which is balogna--UNIX has been around for a long damn time, and in the meantime there has been OS/2, BeOS, NeXTStep, BSD, etc.

Yes, "the world" as in anybody who would care to implement a computer to do some work for a multitude of users. Geek development community. Check. Businesses in search of a computing platform designed for stability and flexibility. Check. Operating system researchers. Check. Linux users. Obviously, check. Those in need of superior reliability. Check.

My mother? She's not part of the world to which I'm referring. But she does know there are viable alternatives to the desktop she's found herself sometimes tortured by on a daily basis.

The modern world has been introduced to Linux. They heard about it during the bubble. People now know there are other things out there besides what comes from Redmond, SCO, IBM, or HP. If they find that isn't suitable for them, or it has failed them in the past, they can search for alternatives. What's more valuable than choice when searching for alternatives? The argument can be made that choice quality is more valuable than choice volume. I'd counter with the fact that competition between choices typically raises quality across the board.

Unix has been around for a long time and in the meantime computing users have explored many of the alternatives. OS/2 and BeOS have not lived up to the task. BSD can certainly stand on it's own. NeXTStep's legacy can be seen in the wildly popular OSX from Apple. Who's to say something better than Linux can't come along?

Admittedly, referring to a bunch of geeks and business as "the world" is a stretch. Point taken. One must look however at growing market share in Asia, India and other places across the globe to understand why I chose the term. Growth in these places is booming. The world is waking up to life outside the intentional incompatibilities and blue screens currently sitting on their desks.

Advantages

[QuietRiot]

I refer the reader here.

On old technologies

[mfterman]

Something to remember is that almost all of the technologies that we use today date back to the sixties. Object oriented programming dates back to the sixties, and yet it wasn't until C++ that it finally broke out into the mainstream. Likewise, it took how many years for the Internet to break out and become useful to people?

The fact is that most stuff that comes out of the Computer Science departments takes years before it can become a useful and practical in the real world. The people sneering at microkernels as an old CS idea that will never work probably were the same folks sneering at OOP when C++ first came out, discussing how broken the C++ implementation was. Or a bunch of other concepts.

The fact is that in time Linux may well shift over to a microkernel to provide advance functionality someday. It may be that microkernel technology is just a little ahead of its time and it's just going to take a few more years for the computer world to catch up to it.

Re:On old technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

programming isn't mainstream.

L4Linux

[cpghost]

Linux too is able to run on top of a version of L4 from the University of Dresden: L4Linux. There's more to L4 than we may think of at first glance!

Anything else usefull?

[RikTheRik]

Sorry to be pessimistic but I don't see any interest to a new kernel.

Whatever design they choose, I have lots of doubts that it will bring any serious improvement.
Even if the linux kernel doesn't have any microkernel design, it did not prevent it to evolve in many directions.
And whatever the design is, they need to evolve... and the evolution is driven by advances in hardware mostly... I'm not sure if in the long run a microkernel has really any advantages.

Also something that I'm not sure Kernel developers have in mind are drivers... do they expect that driver developers will rewrite all existing drivers for their new kernel?
It is enough of a challenge to get drivers for the linux platform, I'm afraid that too many platform would slow down these developments.

Re:Anything else usefull?

[Anonymous Coward]

they'd just write a compatibility layer like Sun did and use Linux drivers.

GNU License on Linux vs. GNU License on HURD?

[waffleman]

HURD is a beautiful idea. However, I think one of the major problems with it isn't even the glacial development cycle. If you read the license on Linux you will see that Linus put in the following:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

As far as I know, the HURD license has no such preamble, which means that you cannot run any non-GPL'ed programs on HURD. None, zero, zip. Why? Because clause 2b of the GPL states:

b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

The reason Linus put the preamble in is that this clause means that if you put two programs in memory at the same time, and they interact in any way, you have created a third derivative program. This is so that, I as an commercial software developer can't simply do some type of unothodox dynamic linking to get around the intent of the 2b. But since every user program must talk to the OS, under this interpretation, every user program must be GPL'ed. Hence Linus' preamble.

So while nobody cares today (and rightly so), somebody will make this an issue at some point, because it has already been made an issue with Linux. If/when it gets made an issue, I cannot foresee RMS putting in a preamble like Linus did.

In this case HURD will only run GPL software, and is therefore useless to general public. It even would be useless to me, and I've used *BSD and GNU/Linux since 1994.

You forget the fundamental problem

[Anonymous Coward]

In order for a hardware driver to function properly, it must disable interrupts on its CPU. This is so that it can read the information off the bus in the shortest time possible and perform handshakes that require exact timing.

This means either you have to run part of the driver in kernel mode, you have to allow a user mode process to disable interrupts, or don't allow drivers to disable interrupts. If you run at least part of the driver in kernel mode, you lose the advantages of user-mode drivers. If you allow user-mode drivers to disable interrupts, you can still have user processes bring down the whole machine. If you don't allow interrupts to be disabled then you won't have fully-functioning hardware.

Which one are you going to choose?

aqazaqa

Linux kernel will benefit greatly from this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Complexity is the real problem in any large software system. This is a good opportunity to rework some of the code at the OS level and simplify the interdependencies in the process of getting it to all work with HURD. Linus' preferred monolithic kernel is faster, but increasing complexity is making improvements more difficult and costly. Reworking all that code, dare I say refactoring, is just the thing the sclerotic Linux kernel needs.

Re:What's next? Duke Nukem Forever release upcommi

[egriebel]

A 15-years-and-counting-delay in delivery. Hurd must be exceptionaly better than Linux if it wants to gain even a minimal market share. I would bet that even OpenSolaris10 will find more users.

Even Amiga or Atari 400/800 has more users than HURD ever will!

Re:Let's see here - OSX & L4

[ravenspear]

What OS we we be using in 20 years, 50 years, 100 years time ? One answer is that it will be Microkernel based

In 100 years we will probably be using quantum computers and all of today's OS paradigms will be obsolete.

Still playing with that '90s OSes?

[sytelus]

I really wonder how much it's worth to contribute and continue projects like this one (and even to Linux at larger scale). Both of them are SO old. Linux, for example, is so freaking outdated from modern OS point of view. Managed .Net and Java style VMs is the next evolution of moden OS but Linux hasn't even reached to a technology summit where Microsoft COM was 5 years ago. Yeah, I know all those security issues and blunders. But from pure OS sophistication point of view, that was the awesome way to let applications built by components. Look at even FireFox. Those poor guys have finally realised its importance and now has started duplicating MS COM as their own XPCOM. But to a person who looks at OS by their feature-richness, technology like XPCOM is an old news from last century. Sometime I don't know what these Linux guys so proud of? For carrieng burden of that '60s OS concepts still in 2000s? Look at the difference between MS and them. MS renews their OS, applies new technologies like COM and .Net and keep building ever more sophisticated dev tools every 5 years or so. It's not because they are not smart but it's because they have evolved so fast. Technically, Windows is far reacher OS than Linux any single day. I view Linux is stuck on Unix base and deprived of many modernizations that goes under the hood of Windows and Macs. Is it because most of these guys are from really old generation. Every now and then some geek of 80s comes around, builds a process loader and sends out news about new OS and others rejoices. Pathetic.

Re:Still playing with that '90s OSes?

[SlashSpam]

To the flame bait here, I can only say:

Tum podex carmen extulit horridulum!

A general remark:
The most important lack of MS-windows IMHO, is not the technical flaws or the great lack of advanced features, but rather that it is not free for all to change the source code, give changes to a friend, or even sell an enhanced specialised version. Even though it wouldn't harm you to burn a copy of the software, in many countries it is not even legal to let your friends copy the software verbatim. In other words, even if you paid a lot of money for the software, you are not allowed to do much with it. Often the license doesn't even allow you to install the program on more than one computer at a time.

Some may argue that this point is void, because they don't care about the law, and copy the software illegally, as there is little or no effective copy protection in existence today. Even if you do not consider this point flawed in its design, as I do, you still risk punishment and it seems very likely that copy protection will improve in the future.

Microsoft Windows lacks to be what the GNU Project has chosen to call "Free Software", which unfortunately due to a flaw in the English language let you believe that it is focused on no price.

GNU/HURD, GNU/Linux, OpenBSD and others are already "Free Software", which means you have a lot of freedom to do pretty much what you want with it. Some of the software, however, has a licence that restricts you from reducing this freedom for other people.

The reason Microsoft hates the "GPL", is that they want to make more money by restricting the freedom for people. The GPL does not allow them to do this. In this way, I find the GPL superior to many other licenses.

For this reason, many will argue that Microsoft and similar companies are evil. The point is however, that they make money acting the way they do. The only way this can change, is if they stop making money this way, or if they begin to make less money this way. One way to stop that, is to stop using their products, a thing I find very easy to do.

If you want to study what "Free Software" really is, and maybe find out why we are so many feels that it a wonderful thing, I guess the GNU Project web server is a good starting point.

/Spam .

Re:Still playing with that '90s OSes?

[sytelus]

I guess this is how it looks like on small scale. On a big picture (next 200 years or so), these are what I would call, a transient issues and trends. I would suspect if the copyright laws or even the whole concept of money has the same meaning in that span. So question is: should I work on duplicating the functionality that someone else already did it 5 years ago. Or Should I invest my effort in inventing new technology that advances the boundary of human knowledge as a whole? Honestly I don't see much benifit in spending a half a decade of my life in creating a word processor that has already existed since years in all its glory. Just for the hake of it, imagine sometime in next 200 years, what if MS opens up their entire source code just like any other open source project and still figures out a way to make money? Where Linux will stand then? Comparing the speed of evolution advantage that MS has, I would imagine Linux and MS OS will stand far apart as long as technology richness strength is concerned. How much time will take before Linux becomes yet another extinct project (well, may be for all but those still living '70s Unix geeks) with millions of lost human hours? Spending my energies in duplicating the functionalities in another OS because of some stupid law is rediculas to me. I however would support any movement with my heart and soul which involves an OS with next generation concepts and which can merit on its own by its pure richness of technologies. But to keep 60s Unix alive by making it wear GUI shells... well I'll leave that to those old generation geeks.

Re:Still playing with that '90s OSes?

[SlashSpam]

Spending my energies in duplicating the functionalities in another OS because of some stupid law is rediculas to me.

You are missing the point. Since MS-Windows split from OS/2, maybe even before that, it has been a copycat. If you doubt that, look at sunview, Mac OS or any other GUI that predates MS-Windows.

If we look at features of the GUI, I don't think you will find many features of MS-Windows has, that didn't or doesn't exist for other OS's. On the other hand, I think you will find many features that MS-Windows do lack, like "focus follows mouse", "vertical or horizontal maximise", "virtual desktops", etc. etc.

In many ways, MS-Windows is still long behind The X Window System, and no wonder. X started well before MS-Windows 3.1 was started, and has evolved continuously. Contrary to MS-Windows, most of the platforms that runs the X Window System doesn't have to deal with old 16-bit code, neither in emulation or any other way. (In other words, the command-line always is and always was on the same level as the GUI, unlike MS-Windows).

What bothers me most about MS-Windows or any other non-free OS, is this: They do not give me the freedom that a GNU system gives me. However, even if you don't want freedom my friend, you still have the freedom to let Microsoft chain you.

/Spam .

First program executed?

[LooseChanj]

Does an instant segfault really count?

Not just a curiousity...

[stoborrobots]

But this is on L4, not Mach, runs on x86 (AFAIK only x86), and is up to date; 2.4.28, and 2.6.10 are available.

Linux on Mach (MkLinux) is as you describe, and even L4Linux was done mostly to understand the L4 technology. but the L4 port is definitely more that a curiosity...

HURD

[HogynCymraeg]

Hurd Undergoes Repeated Delays

Oh, shit!!

[Feztaa]

"OMG, d00dz, it runs a program now! What do we do?!"
"Oh, fuck, dude, I dunno! We should start over from scratch or something!"
"Hey, good idea!"

The kernel already has a new name

[Bas_Wijnen]

The L4Ka-based kernel is a new project

It's not an L4-based kernel. L4 is the kernel, the rest, while part of the OS, is not. Most of the rest will simply reuse the code from the Hurd on Mach, so it really isn't a different project. It only has a different structure underneath (which isn't visible to anyone but system programmers, except for performance and security).

that sounds like it has a lot of promise and may address problems that both Linux and commercial kernels have with modularity and extensibility.

It's not the kernel which will solve them, but we hope they are indeed solved by the project.

This new kernel should get a snazzy new name to get that message across.

How about calling the kernel L4, as their makers named it? (Just like we all call a certain operating system GNU, as its makers named it ;-) ). That's a snazzy new name, compared to Mach, don't you think? ;-)

Reflex action?

[sanityspeech]

I recall an October 2004 article in which Mr. Torvalds suggested that ...HURD is dead. I could not help but wonder if this was an attempt to assure spectators like myself that the HURD project is *still alive*.

Make no mistake, I will definitely give HURD a shot when it becomes as usable as Linux was five years ago. Given the time delay taken to report execution of the first application, I suspect such usability is decades away. By that time, Linux itself may have been replaced by a more efficient kernel, Microsoft may have to compete with Apple for minuscle market share, and BSD-style forks may have happened to the HURD code.

The glacial pace of HURD development may explain why it took more than three months for them to take this action which may be seen as a response to Linus' comments.

Not a troll, just a thought.

Really Great

[Pan T. Hose]

Yes. The Hurd-on-L4 bases all its communication on a capability system. Programs running on it may or may not explicitly make use of it (it's all wrapped for the POSIX interface, so they obviously don't see it), but they will use it underneath anyway.

That is really great to hear. Now I have no doubts that Debian GNU/Hurd will be my future system of choice. Today I use Debian GNU/Linux and my main problems are drivers running in the kernel space causing security and stability issues and the lack of real capability system. I'm glad that there is going to be a perfect system for my needs hopefully in not too distant future.

A good thing about this is of course that things like chroot are very easily implemented (there are many more good things, as I'm sure you know), but there is one problem: Any program which uses it is not portable to other systems. That means most programs will not want to use it. Which is a pity, of course, as it is a great system.

I'm sure I will use it even for the price of nonportability because I have already hit the wall of user-based privilege control system's limitations too many times, which is quite frustrating as no one else seems to see any problem with them. I suppose that there will be some convenient way similar to chroot and ulimit to run programs with restricted privileges even if they are themselves not aware and dependent on capabilities. Also I hope that it will be possible to use capabilities where available from managed environments like Parrot or maybe even directly in places like Apache configuration to give specific and limited rights to individual scripts. The possibilities are very promising.