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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!'"
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?
return 0; }
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
Now, 22 years later, a definitve breakthrough has been performed.
I see this as an excitement
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.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
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
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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?
Gorkman
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.
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.
:)). 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.
:-)
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
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.
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. :-)
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.
Your point? The world now knows there are viable alternatives, and they can be had for historical lows on price.
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.
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.
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
Oscar Sierra
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.
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.
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