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Watch Out Linux, GNU Hurd Coming
sfcrazy writes "Debian now has concrete plans to bring GNU Hurd to the larger community. GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download."
Duke Nukem Forever actually gets released and now Hurd? Pinch me I must be dreaming!
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Oh lawd! Somebody catch me. I've caught the vapors!
Much like it's long-awaited vaporware cousin, Duke Nukem Forever, the wait will not be worth it.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Will be the year of the Hurd Desktop. 'Nuff said.
One of the very few people to put me on her Slashdot enemies list did so because I made a derogatory statement about the length of the HURD development process. In, as I recall, the year 2000 or 2001. It was a running joke at least five years before that.
Way to be timely and relevant, GNU.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Is the HURD even still relevant?
More relevant than your thinly-veiled attempt at grabbing first post.
Next time, either post something that genuinely adds to the discussion or nothing at all. Have a nice day.
But as for actually running it day-to-day, the Hurd never was relevant simply because it never had the broad driver support that users need. That won't change unless and until Hurd attracts a substantial developer base - but this is a good step in the direction of that.
I am trolling
BSD userland on top of GNU Hurd.
"What the hell do you call an OS like that?"
"I'll call it 'The Aristocrats'"
--
BMO
I swear I saw this headline 20 years ago.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download.
It speaks volumes that the highlight is the inclusion of a graphical installer. Likely no mouse support though....
Because I think an angry Stallman is a funny Stallman. So I Iook forward to this new Linux variant and I thank Linus Torvalds from the bottom of my heart. There would be no free software movement without you and you cannot be venerated enough. I wonder how Mr. Torvalds came up with Hurd? Oh wait, it is because he is a genius.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Who cares? I mean really... we have all the bases covered by Linux and BSD...
If you need a GPLv3 licensed OS for some reason, this will be one. Linux will probably never contain the patent guards Hurd will. That might be important for some folks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Seriously, it's been, what, 15+ years? The project seems to have two main phases of development:
1) Several months of intense bickering followed by factions breaking off to make half-assed attempts at porting to a more modern microkernel.
2) A year or two of complete silence as the ports are abandoned and a couple of diehards continue to work on Mach.
Where are they now? They've got a couple of novelty builds that almost work reliably enough to play with for a weekend. Big fuckken deal.
This is interesting, but last time I checked, HURD was 32-bit (for the lulz, from the start it was written ahead of its time, when 16-bit was the norm). I don't do much low level stuff, mostly python and web development, so would it be difficult to port it to x64? It will be interesting to use, though. Anybody know if it's got linux binary compatibility?
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
They have probably noticed the end of the world is December 21, 2012 and they hope it's true. That way no one will actually notice Hurd was postponed again ...
Nope. All I saw was an organization that maintains a distribution that is the basis for one of the fastest growing Linux distributions offer a distribution based on a kernel made by an organization that maintains one of the most used software compiler suites and userland tools. Please tell me where I should be looking. :P
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I can't be the only person that's never hurd, umm, heard of it.
"The Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for UNIX, a popular operating system kernel."
From http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/what_is_the_gnu_hurd.html
Proof: Compare this to that.
Which makes you go "awwwwwwwww, how cute."
nVidia drivers for HURD? VMware on HURD?
Your evocation of the unholy names of proprietary software packages and Hurd in the same sentence make Stallman cry. Please stop that.
(it's probably the biggest open-source microkernel out there)
Sure if you ignore Darwin.
Then Linux 64 bits native Adobe Flash Reader
And Finally the HURD...
The world is coming to an end !
FROM: martin-boundary
TO: jlechem
This is a pinch-a-gram. To activate, please pinch yourself.
No, the reverse of that.
Does this mean I'll actually see a GNU operating system in my lifetime?
I estimate that if I'm lucky I've got another 40-45 years.
You are welcome on my lawn.
GP was contributing; he was attempting to inform a user about a social convention that he was obviously unaware of. (That posts should contain content.) While it may not have been terribly relevant to the original HURD discussion, it was relevant to the post that he was responding to. While such off-topic tangents aren't to be encouraged, it's pretty clear that ignoring them won't do anything to help the problem, so an educational effort is probably appropriate. While it won't weed out trolls, it may help cut down on people who actually think that "FP1!!" is a socially-accepted convention here on Slashdot.
Like, after a decade?
It's a Mach microkernel with a bunch of daemons and glibc to emulate the UNIX interface.
There's nothing like a thick client when you have to compile a few thousand files.
Way to be timely and relevant, GNU.
What could be greater show of health and vigor than naming your first release "Debian Wheezy?"
"A" decade?
Here's what Linus Torvalds had to say about the GNU OS in 1992
"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now."
Plan 9 could use some love. Maybe someone could make it a GUI that doesn't look like it's from the late 1980s.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
As I recall, it was already late when I was a CS major in 1991 using GNU Emacs on SunOS.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This reminds me of the scene in Austin Powers where the guy screams as a steamroller comes barreling at him at a couple feet per minute. And he stands there and screams for the entire two minutes it takes for the steamroller to reach him and run him over.
Hey! In two years, I'll release the bestest mesh network system ever! I promise!
I'm using /. time:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/07/14/2137238/After-a-Decade-Mac-Sales-Again-Top-10
GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013.
A couple of years now. Just like cheap solar panels and sustainable fusion and the replacement for the space shuttle. Just a couple more years now.
How about you call us when it's working?
Seriously, stop telling us what you are going to do. Instead tell us what you have done. One is impressive and the other is not.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Read This to see why.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Linux the kernel is just as ideologically pure as the Hurd, even from the point of view of Richard M. Stallman. Every one of the millions of lines of code in Linux is still licensed under the GPL last time I checked. The reason why the Hurd is so far behind is not ideology, but largely because their development process over the last decade looks pretty much the way Duke Nukem Forever's went over the last decade. They lost focus. They shifted from Mach to L4 to Coyotos as the base microkernel over the course of the last decade, just as DNF shifted from using the Quake II engine to the Unreal Engine and so on. In other words, they lost focus. Stallman has even said that he was "not very optimistic about the GNU HURD. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems", and even added that "finishing it is not crucial" because a free kernel already exists in Linux.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
If Valve really didn't know how to count to 3, we'd have Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2' Champion Edition, Half-Life 2 Turbo, Super Half-Life 2, Super Half-Life 2 Turbo, Super Block-Life 2 Turbo (a puzzle game), the midquel Alpha series (this is either Portal or something connected to it), and finally Half-Life 3.
It could be worse. Debian could be naming it "Wheezy Walrus", just as the first releases of another .deb-based free OS were called Warty Warthog and Hoary Hedgehog.
The question I'd posit at this point is why? Why support a project that was already well on its way to being defunct fifteen years ago? Why support a project whose punchline was "Duke Nukem Forever"? Yes, it would have been an awesome thing in the early and mid-90s, but Linux came along and the GNU userland tools were compiled on top of it, and the rest, as they say, is history. So why on Earth would I want to support Hurd, a project that even if it got a big whack of cash right now probably wouldn't have a fully-functional product in two or three years, and even if it did, it's microkernel architecture would make it slower than modern kernels.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"I'll call it 'The Aristocrats'"
And maybe for release names, you could do like Debian and use character names from a Disney film: "The Aristocats".
"Compiling a few thousand files" is something professionals do, not something a home user does. Professionals associated with established companies will remain eligible to purchase, and will remain able to afford, a thick client.
</devils-advocate>
I claim that there are some kinds of software that can never be free under this system of things. These include high-production-value video games and tax preparation software. What would Mr. Stallman say is wrong with this claim?
I wonder, if someone ports DRM drivers, mesa and Wayland to it... almost like Mac OS X, but with GNU userspace and a Mach kernel... I'm not saying it can't be done. Maybe I'm just crazy for such thoughts :)
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
There's no reason to believe that "cloud" computing necessarily means the web or the web browser. Native apps can hit a remote API just as easily as a web browser can, and they can do so while offering the user a whole lot more functional potential. People thought that the full browser on the iPhone would be the killer feature and nobody would need anything else. But guess what? Turns out people actually prefer apps for their cloud services when they can get them. Apps are a huge industry on mobile devices. I'll tell you what, if I could have a native app that could hit the Google Apps API, I'd totally use that over the clunky in-browser version.
Charging Stallman vs. Chair Throwing Steve Ballmer...
for all the crap we give "SyFy" for airing professional wrestling, THAT is a match that I'd be perfectly fine watching.
Servers can't compile?
Duke Nukem Forever actually gets released and now Hurd?
Yeah but Hurd will only lets you run two processes at once.
Including Bash.
Something about a side effect of "bringing the object through the rift".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wait... it's 2011
Well that depends on if you start at 0.
They might have said the 2012th year...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
don't worry stallman!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Too many people forget this that the worst product on the market trumps the best intentions. I get rather tired of hearing statements hating on a given product because $replacement_x will be so much better. Doesn't matter if $replacement_x is not out. I need something now, not at some indefinite point in the future.
Then of course you get things like HURD that have been delayed to the point of being laughable. I don't even want to hear anything from them except for "It is out now," or "The project has been killed." With a (non)development cycle this long they need to STFU otherwise.
Right, so there is no room for AmigaOS or Haiku, etc, etc, etc,?
We have choice and they can learn from each other, and create things their individual development paths result in, but which might not have come to be, had there only been two single tracks.
Try accessing your HD movie collection over a mobile connection from your propitiatory 'cloud' service of choice, then cook dinner whilst you wait, oh yeh, and i hope you have all the receipts.
I will be sticking with my local OS. And will be keen to see how Hurd develops, and what it brings, over the coming years.
Computing has moved onto mobile now
LOL...good one.
Advice: on VPS providers
The question I'd posit at this point is why? Why support a project that was already well on its way to being defunct fifteen years ago? Why support a project whose punchline was "Duke Nukem Forever"?
You're positing this question on a site where people get their rocks off writing httpd daemons in PostScript...
Advice: on VPS providers
No, the reverse of that.
Port the HURD to DNF and have the first graphic operating system; one with graphics more primitive than such as arithmetic and logic.
I have wondered if the Bills making prudent draft picks for once was a sign of the apocalypse. (failed draft picks have not helped the team's suckitude the past few years. I can see why they went for building up their defense this time - Fitzpatrick is a decent QB and his offense at least a few times put up a lot of points only to see the defense allow even more points.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Is this relevant anymore? It seems to me that the main source of slowdowns would be context switching, which would be greatly reduced on a multi-core machine - and even in the old days, my Pentium (1) managed hundreds of context switches without problems.
Besides, a Linux distro is already using a kind of microkernel structure: the X server is a separate process, despite providing a core function for most programs the user uses. And of course there's the window manager running on top of it, and every desktop environment insist on adding their own set of services too.
The fight between monolithic and microkernels is ultimately about where a line in the sand should be drawn, and just as silly as most other such fights.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
From the minutes of the March 2011 FTPMaster meeting if it's not ready for some sort of release it will be evicted from the main archives.
The TODO list is getting better ... but we shall see.
If that can actually be done safely and efficiently, it also means a non-free driver can't crash the kernel or fuck up other drivers. I would guess there are security implications as well.
Right now, a bug in the nVidia kernel driver on Linux could compromise the security of the entire machine, or crash the entire OS, or flip some bit in some other unconnected kernel system (or userland process), and it's hard enough to debug these things when you do have source code. So wanting an untainted kernel makes a lot of sense.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Arch Hurd is already available so no need to wait for Debian to release anything if you want to try it out. http://www.archhurd.org/
The man who is the father of the Mach Microkernel and one of the key engineers at NeXT is no where mentioned concerning the Mach Microkernel history on the Hurd's web site. Truly shows no respect towards history. You'd think Rashid was Linus Torvalds and the sole creator of Mach. Not even close.
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
The BSDs. You don't have a Linux kernel then, obviously, but if you insist, I guess you could rip out the BSD kernel and replace it by Linux.
(+1, Disagree)
Problem w/ that is that there are countless FOSS projects in the world, most of them w/ inadequate support (except from companies like Red Hat). So instead of supporting newer ones that don't bring anything new to the table, why not work on enriching the features of current FOSS projects, instead of always forking them? The 'community' seems to follow the cliche - 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it!'
There is so much of stuff that could be done for the Linux distributions already out there. How about FOSS drivers for the best selling new hardware out there, be it Wi-Fi controllers, GPUs, tablet mousepads (like Wacom) and so on? How about making GNUstep, GNOME3, KDE, et al easily installable on all platforms w/ minimal dependency interruptions? How about making installation packages that run on all distributions, regardless of RPM/YUMM/DEB/TAR.GZ formats? How about making some simple video-editing software (equivalent to Windows Movie Maker, not some complicated thing like Cinerella) that will run on all FOSS OSs? Or enrich the feature set of KOffice to match that of MS Office 2010? IPv6 is now starting to be introduced - why not have FOSS versions of IPAM, DHCP6, DNS6 and other IPv6 management software that will bring that functionality to all OSs? Or FOSS CAD tools that won't cost an arm & a leg? Or FOSS virtualization software? Sounds better than having variations of GNUstep OSs - Afterstep, LinuxStep & Window-Maker.
Seems to me that that would be a lot more useful than coming out w/ a new distribution of Linux, BSD or now HURD. I mean, even if one came out w/ it, why would the average user suddenly switch to that from RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Minix3, Scientific Linux or whatever else it is that s/he is using? Instead, make something that will be easily installable and fully functional on all these platforms, so that one can enhance their value, and what's better.
Sounds like a much better focus for developers, and might even make the 'community' a lot more appreciated outside its circle!
Just a small point (I do get the gist of what you're saying): /. is not representative of the open source community.
You really think that Slashdot attracts the same demographic as years ago? The user id of my original Slashdot account is as slow as yours (around 30000) and I think it's obvious that the level of hacker skills now present on Slashdot is nowhere near what it was a decade ago.
Some guy from GNUStep is calling Slashdot irrelevant? Glass houses, my good sir.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I wonder if HURD will be a good basis for an efficient mobile OS? Has anyone heard about the resource requirements?
Bravo
Well, the other way around already exists: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
New things are always on the horizon
Debian is about what the people on Debian work on.
Making programs portable, on hardware and kernels seems to be something people are interrested it.
New things are always on the horizon
Being born in 1986 makes you old now? Get off my lawn.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Darwin isn't a microkernel, it's a hybrid.
Darwin != OSX.
Further, were it not for all the added bits that turn it into OS X%
Forgetting Licensing and Patenting issues for a moment -
What are the advantages of using a Hurd based debian over a linux based one?
Are there any performance benefits or architecural differences that make it better in some way?
Why might i want to use hurd other than for psuedo political reasons?
Nick ...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Bad examples. AmigaOS and Haiku are quite different from other alternatives. HURD lets you run a subset of the programs that work on other *NIX systems, slowly, on a subset of the hardware that other *NIX systems support. Oh, and with a less permissive license. If you want a GNU-flavoured system, there are already lots of GNU/Linux systems you can use. If you want a solid UNIX system, there are a few BSD flavours to choose from. If you want an actively-developed POSIX-compliant microkernel, there's Minix 3. HURD is just there for the everything-must-be-GNU crowd. It exists for political, not technical, reasons.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Agreed, people should welcome new projects. But stagnation? I think there is reason to be more optimistic than this.
My Linux desktop has never been so stable, productive or cool looking as it is today. In work, every server I connect to these days is running Linux. There was a time when I found I had to use a mix of closed/open tools to get the job done. These days everything I and my company does is powered by Open Source projects.
I don't see any stagnation. I see constant innovation at an ever increasing rate. And long may it continue! :)
So it tries to be relevant by breaking de facto code standards and trying to shove needless fixes on other people's code?
In this case, all it will accomplish is this:
#ifndef PATH_MAX
#define PATH_MAX some_arbitrary_value
#endif
How does that improve "the overall software quality a lot"?
Requiring Linux constrains you a lot. FreeBSD 10 aims to remove all GPL'd code (and, therefore, all GNU code) from the base system. It will include clang as the system compiler, LLVM libc++ as the C++ standard library, csh as the shell, and so on. Currently, the only stumbling block is GNU ld. It may be possible to import the Solaris linker, but replacing GPL'd code with CDDL code is not ideal. Hopefully someone will write a BSD licensed linker soon. And even more hopefully, that person won't be me!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Sorry - we're working on it. GNUstep base (Foundation) passed 1.0. GNUstep gui (AppKit) is roughly at 10.3 parity, although implements some stuff from versions up to 10.6. I've recently been working on some of the core Objective-C stuff. The new runtime release is due in the next couple of days (would have been sooner if I could persuade people other than me to test it...) and supports all of the Objective-C features of OS X 10.7 (including automatic reference counting and garbage collection).
We should be releasing a stable release of EtoileFoundation in the next few days. That's been holding up things for a while, because everything else in Étoilé depends on it, but now the whole test suite passes on Linux and FreeBSD. That should be followed by releases of EtoileUI and LanguageKit (once I've finished the current rewrite of the blocks implementation to be compatible with Objective-C blocks and make it use ARC or GC exclusively, rather than its own ad-hoc retain / release semantics). The ObjectMerging4 branch is going to be merged into trunk soon, which should give us a stable API for the core persistency model, even if we can't (initially) do all of the branching and merging that we want.
It looks like we're also going to be seeing some funding from the Tanzanian government soon. They want to deploy FreeBSD / Étoilé-based infrastructure, so they need us to actually make stuff work...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've got September being the month that Steve Ballmer starts to intimate Hurd is infringing on Microsoft patents.
The parent poster illustrates something very interesting: Why having a sense of humor and self-irony is still relevant.
Also, ignoring the "I'm better than you"-irony in your post, "technically superior to Linux" can easily be discussed. I think the kernel community would gladly point out that "the best technology" quickly becomes irrelevant if it's impossible to work with (say if takes two decades of flip-flopping just to release something people can use). And having "developer friendliness" as part of the "rate this technology"-bar is not far fetched, unless you actually want said technology to be: Irrelevant.
Someday maybe a HURD distribution will be released, and someday maybe HURD will surpass the market share of Linux. Until then, chill out and enjoy the source.
Being born in 1986 makes you old now? Get off my lawn.
If I had mod points I'd mod you down. Just for not being a grumpy old git like me.
see?
slashdot community is for porn! :D
Every one of the millions of lines of code in Linux is still licensed under the GPL last time I checked
You didn't check very hard. The Linux kernel contains files under BSD, MIT, and even WTFPL, licenses. It's only the aggregate work that is GPL'd, individual parts must be under GPL-compaltible licenses, but they don't have to be GPL'd.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux.
Citation needed.
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
Because taking the piss is far more amusing to us in our juvenile little minds.
In all seriousness though, the big problem is that GNU Hurd has just been going on too long. You might notice that many people are comparing it to Duke Nukem, this is because they have both been successively over hyped for too many years. It is like people crying wolf, eventually the would be rescuers just stop listening and let you get eaten.
I started reading this thinking that GNU Hurd had finally found some developers an was on course for a stable release in the near future. After looking around the site it seems that you only have 4 or 5 active developers and are in dire need of more people to make the Wheezy release. If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility. You are far more likely to bring developers to the system by that than by simply posting a projected release date which may or may not be achievable.
You are right though when you say the slashdot community has changed a great deal as it certainly has. But some of the people here are still exactly the people you would like to bring to your projects, either GNU Step or Hurd or whatever. The trick is to appeal to them and ignore the mass of immature wanna bees you are so critical of.
The whole problem with hurd has never been a technical shortcoming, it has always been that the people leading the project lacked the people skills needed. Thats certainly not to say that Linus is perfect in this regard, but something certainly made more people throw time at his pet Linux project all those years ago.
I dont read
Are you trying to illustrate your words by acting as if you were yourself really "superior" ?
I heard about hurd long time ago and it was already a long time project. I heard it will soon be released so many time that I can't count them. I even actually spoke with people working on it (about ten years ago) that were assuring me that the project was on the run for a stable release.
Ten years later, I'm acting as supervisor for student writing their own kernels every year: in 4 years of activities I have seen about 7 kernel projects reaching an "interesting state", and those kernel were all "experimental" in their own way: micro-kernel, coded in some specific language (D, OCaml ... ), fully modularized, coded for exotic architectures ... All are single-man project done by students.
Booting and reaching the state were drivers and userland are the next checkpoint is not so hard, even when you deal with "new inner architecture". But keeping a project really active so that you reach a stable state, is much harder, and it seems that hurd fails on that matter.
Hurd might have been "new" twenty years ago, but for now, it is just another not-working micro-kernel.
(oh, mind your respect, should I talk about GNUstep ?)
Marwan Burelle co-Head of EPITA's System Laboratory
Why is it superior? Just because it's a microkernel?
Microkernels were the darling of OS research for almost the entirely of the 90's. But by the end of the 90's, most researchers had had enough. The alleged gains in configurability, reliability, security, and so on never materialized; but what never disappeared was the fact that they were stinking slow. Context switching is a fundamental limitation of such an architecture. And from what I've heard, a lot more complicated to program -- which leads to more programming errors and ugly performance hacks to compensate for any potential increase in reliability, security and so on they might have gained.
It's possible that Hurd has managed to overcome these limitations. But it has definitely earned its reputation of being slow and cumbersome; if that has changed, the burden of proof is on the Hurd community.
There are a few True Believers out there, still working on Hurd and Minix and L4 and the like, but they have yet to produce anything shown to be worth using.
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Followed the link until I here:
/proc/version
;)
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/running/debian.html
So to try it I downloaded and ran in in qemu as per the instructions.
Playing around a bit I noticed this:
root@debian:~# uname -a
GNU debian 0.3 GNU-Mach 1.3.99/Hurd-0.3 i686-AT386 GNU
root@debian:~# cat
Linux version 2.6.1 (GNU 0.3 GNU-Mach 1.3.99/Hurd-0.3 i686-AT386)
So maybe you're right in calling it Linux
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
I agree.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
--The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux.
I agree in some respects.
HURD is superior to linux in some ways (modularity, organization, maintainability, simplicity and most of all, bloat). In other ways it isn't (performance and maturity).
HURD is getting better but it's got a LONG way to go. It has to not be dog slow. Until that happens, no one will use it.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Nonsense.
An architecture is superior for a given purpose, or judged by a particular standard. There isn't some magic score card which can declare an architecture to be plainly superior.
HURD will be clean. Plan9 was clean (and I have a fondness for it). I also prototype some logic in Haskell but know full well why most production code isn't written in it.
Linux is a bit of a mess. So is BSD. So is every general purpose operating system that has ever been fielded for a significant period. The warts come from being adapted to serve many different purposes, and working around many real world problems that clean-room architecture gets to just ignore. And getting some of it wrong and only fixing some of it halfway because it turns out that in real deployments (not just "the market"), clean isn't the most important thing people need from an OS.
Building a fresh OS, even over two decades, is impressive. Most Slashdotters couldn't do it. But, seriously, many research OS's have been written and shelved since HURD was started, and none of them have run around insisting they were the second coming. HURD has some neat ideas. But it's getting mocked because it's been presented with the kind of pretension and arrogance you only get away with if you deliver perfectly and on time.
Someday maybe a HURD distribution will be released,
You see the difference is the "maybe". We hear this "maybe" for years, since 1991 as far as I know. I was 16, I'm 36 now.
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
MINIX 1 & 2 were teaching tools. MINIX 3, which is "loosely based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX," wants to not only be a teaching tool, but also be a serious option for small & embedded systems. Also, this new version of MINIX has only been in active development for about six years.
Anyways, I've rambled on enough. You can read more about it here: here and here
I will be interested when it is actually finished and incorporated in a distro as end-user friendly as Ubuntu.
...I might've cared. Hurd is an interesting idea from a CS research PoV, but it's taken so long to come out that Linux and the BSDs have long since filled any niche it might've had in the real world.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
For those too lazy to use a search engine:
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/weblogs/ArneBab/technical-advantages-of-the-hurd.html
Hurd is based on the Mach microkernel which happens to be the same microkernel that OS X uses, so I think it's fair to say that microkernels are here, working and aren't 'stinking slow'.
Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them?
I believe today's article on fanboyism is relevant here. We might have a built-in predisposition to agressively defending a "brand" and ignoring any evidence that another brand is either better or indistinguishable.
Your argument made sense 15 years ago, but today our desktop systems are 2.x GHz behemoths that spend 99% of their life in idle cycles.
I think you have problems with the definition of the word "evict":
"It may then reenter the main archive whenever it is ready to get released with the next release."
It has been done hundreds of times outside of Java. Any app can make SOAP or RPC calls. They can even read JSON from a standard HTTP request. You don't need a web browser to make an HTTP request. RMI-IIOP or Java not required. What do you thnk all those iPhone apps are using to communicate with servers? Twitter apps that use the Twitter API. Desktop and mobile phone Facebook apps. Dropbox. Your phone syncing photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube. Standalone RSS readers. All done through native apps + various protocols. That all qualifies as using "cloud" services. A web browser is just ONE way to use "cloud" type services.
"If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility."
Given the total ignorance that the internet community has for the hurd it is probably better that the development is left to the few who are willing to put in the time and effort to understand the problem correctly so that they can make meaningful contributions.
The Hurd is radically different platform for application and OS development. Linux is no more than another POSIX implementation and the concepts are well known to all so it is easier to get contributions from the mainstream community.
"Just because it's a microkernel?"
you make this assertion that it is "just a microkernel" and then you proceed to tear that concept apart.
But your failure is the the assumption that "it's just a microkernel", it's clear you have read none of the hurd design docs and your assumption is faulty.
You say "the fact that they were stinking slow" and that just sounds funny given today's modern virus-ridden desktops that spend 99+% of their CPU cycles in idle more.
I have never seen such ignorant arguments:
- Conflation of development time with product quality: "Minix just got paging working last year" Last I heard, quality products take MORE time to develop, not less.
- Complaints of "inefficiency" when the target platform has 10X the necessary compute power for the task at hand.
- Complaints about "long development time" when compared to the 20+ years that it has took for BSD to achieve commercial success in the market as OSX.
If any of you people would actually stop to read the hurd design docs you would realize that it has already had influence on your desktop. FUSE and SELinux are bolted-on implementations of concepts that were first fleshed out and implemented in the hurd.
"HURD is just there for the everything-must-be-GNU crowd. It exists for political, not technical, reasons."
Seemingly you could make that argument. However, the purpose of the two example i gave was that they weren't Linux (or *nix) and offered interesting features based on different development paths, that may not have otherwise come to be. Such as the great RAM disk feature in AmigaOS, whereby you can install new programs to RAM, for testing purposes. Or the pervasive tabbing applications feature in Haiku.
Point being, there is always room at the party for people to come up with radically different OSs, and that there are certainly things to be gained from that. Besides, if people choose to dedicate their time to these projects, they obviously see value in them, even if that is just a focus on 'purity' (in this case), and who is anyone else to say these projects are worthless, especially in the case of Hurd, when we haven't see what it has to offer, in the long run.
This has nothing to do with which product is technically superior or who's feeling superior to whom. It has everything to do with the fact that since the release of Duke Nukem Forever, the Hurd is the world's most notorious instance of vaporware. That's what all the sniggering is about, and who can blame us?
And even if your point were true (and it's not), that somehow means that Slashdot is irrelevant? That's a total non sequitur.
Developers of HURD think HURD is superior to the competition. Film at 11.
I guess we should have specified that we wanted an INDEPENDENT look at whether the HURD was superior.
Overloaded application servers? Sure.
The Hurd is radically different platform for application and OS development. Linux is no more than another POSIX implementation and the concepts are well known to all so it is easier to get contributions from the mainstream community.
But isn't that itself part of the problem? If you're going to introduce something that's a paradigm shift, you either need to get a lot of people to shift with you or relegate yourself to "also-ran" status while a small group continue to work on it. Linux gained traction because in its day there was just nothing like it out there. Operating systems were closed, limited or just plain useless to most and Linux filled a niche that could just as easily have been filled with HURD. But HURD is a day late and a dollar short; that ship has sailed.
Because it's a radically different platform for application and OS development, you're going to find a lot of resistance to developing on it simply because it's too different. Linux had the advantage of building on what had come before, and for all its warts has become hugely successful as a result. These days, for most of what people wish to accomplish, Linux is a known, well documented and stable platform for which to write. It's also "good enough" in most instances that the extra work involved in developing to a new paradigm just isn't worth it.
Like it or not, because of this commercial support for developing for HURD is going to be a long time coming if it comes at all. At least for the immediate to mid-term future, HURD developers are going to be in low demand but also low supply... which means salaries are often going to be higher for a HURD developer. A manager looking to build his empire isn't going to use HURD unless he's got some agenda beyond just making money; he's going to use Linux and hire a half dozen entry level Linux hackers for the price of one HURD developer. And that's assuming HURD even gains any traction at all in the corporate space, which let's face it is one of the things that really pushed Linux to the success it has met today.
I may be wrong, but HURD is a solution to a problem that was already solved twenty years ago. The world has moved on, and now we're looking for solutions for other problems. Maybe HURD will be the answer to one of them, I don't know... but until Linux is no longer "good enough" to make work I just don't see it.
Your choice! We'll check back in another ten years and see how you're doing.
I keep hearing how HURD is simple and maintainable, but nobody seems to be able to get it running. That's not "simple and maintainable" in my book...
"If this is the case then try and ask the community for help, cap in hand with humility."
Given the total ignorance that the internet community has for the hurd it is probably better that the development is left to the few who are willing to put in the time and effort to understand the problem correctly so that they can make meaningful contributions.
The Hurd is radically different platform for application and OS development. Linux is no more than another POSIX implementation and the concepts are well known to all so it is easier to get contributions from the mainstream community.
This kind of assumes that not one single person out there could come on board and actually bring anything worthwhile to the project, which is a very arrogant attitude. If you asked for help you might get a lot of piss taking from ignoramuses, you might also get a single person who actually helps and that one person is why you ask. The single person makes it worthwhile with their contribution to the project.
Go and read the email that accompanied Linus's first ever code drop for an exercise in humility and how to bring other people on board a project. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux). He started by aiming low and setting an easily achievable goal that motivated many people to try and help. Hurd seems to have always moved the goalposts out of sight whenever things started looking promising and that massively de-motivates people who have worked for a goal, even if they do acknowledge the new goal is a better idea.
I dont read
How is that different from any other server application?
I got modded down for this comment - perhaps because I made what could have been taken as a negative comment about the Ubuntu community. I use Ubuntu and am loosely a part of the community - which contains a lot of people with bad opinions who put in little to no effort to make things better. The thing is those people are for the most part just ignored. That was my point. I have nothing against Ubuntu - I love it (I also love Debian).
Surely the final arrival of GNU Hurd must be the seventh sign.
Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them?
Wait a minute--I thought this was about Hurd. Are we instead discussing something new?
There are plenty of parents that are younger than Hurd; "new" hardly seems to be a reasonable word to use when discussing it.
hawk
Some guy from GNUStep is calling Slashdot irrelevant? Glass houses, my good sir.
Wow... Ad Hominem much? And if you don't know what that means, perhaps you should dig out a latin textbook someplace and learn something.
But you see, you've proven my point here. You reject GNUstep because it's not GNOME or C++ or something else you're used to. You reject it just because it's the thing to do. Because the herd does it. You do this to HURD in the same manner.
What I'm asking the community to do is to take a step back from all of this sycophantic bullsh*t and take a critical look at itself. What good has this exclusionary attitude had for the open source community? None. The only good it has done is to force many, potentially good, projects into non-existence.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
...they need to go write their own OS where proprietary drivers are okay, because we Linux users don't want them.
Fuck you, you do not speak for all Linux users.
I would much prefer an open source driver to a proprietary one, all things being equal. All things are not equal. As cool as AMD has been lately, their proprietary Linux drivers still have far better 3D performance than the open ones.
More importantly, I run proprietary software on Linux, even proprietary software I've paid for! I'm ok with that.
I would still rather my system be open source, and I would especially like it if the proprietary stuff I run (even drivers) was properly sandboxed. I find myself wondering why I should be forced to trust this gigantic binary blob from nVidia more than I trust the JavaScript running on any random website. I understand the technical reasons why this is needed right now, but if something like HURD can solve them, I'm all for that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
I understood your argument up to this point, but then you had to resort to a "he didn't add this to minix until 20 years after it was started, so he must suck" argument which, in spite of it being dressed up in technical language is another "argument against the man" (i.e. Ad Hominem) attack against someone who has spoke out against Linux.
It's easy to find fault in the person making the argument. What's harder is to argue the actual point. Part of the issue with microkernels is that, yes, they are, typically, quite slow... but that's not what I was referring to. More specifically I was referring to the translators which run in userspace on HURD. This is a powerful capability which Linux doesn't have. It illustrates a fundamental element of design which is something that HURD can leverage in the future.
Personally, if it's all about technical superiority, I think we should all be using Plan9 OS.... but that's just me. ;)
But you also have to remember.... the machines they were judging Mach and other microkernels on at the time were not very powerful. Today's machines are orders of magnitude faster. I believe that such an architecture would have no problems on todays hardware.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I did some research, and according to this article, although OSX does use Mach, it is nonetheless not a microkernel:
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
It wasn't an ad hominem attack. It's about the "True Believer" nature I've seen in many people who work on microkernels (including Tanenbaum and some guys I've met working on L4). The main argument against microkernels is that most of the people trying to implement them are more interested in academic concepts, and are completely uninterested in actually making something that works well. Paging is basic operating system functionality. If you've had an OS for 20 years and have either been unable to implement paging, or didn't think that paging was an important capability to prioritize, then I think there's something wrong with your judgement.
Now someone else responded that Minix 1 and 2 were only meant to be teaching tools, and 3 is his first attempt at making something useful. Maybe there's something to that. If I were to write the post again, I probably wouldn't include that jibe.
OK, so what's this translator about and why does it make HURD so much awesomer? :-)
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
There are up-to-date GNUstep packages for FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Debian usually lags by a release or so. Arch Linux and Gentoo are pretty good at providing GNUstep support. Not sure about Red Hat. That should be easy - GNUstep Make can generate RPMs automatically - but I don't know if anyone does it. I'm pretty sure Inverse distributes GNUstep-base RPMs for use with SOGo, but they don't need AppKit, so I don't know if they require anything else.
Oh, and there are screenshots floating around from a couple of years ago of someone running WindowMaker and a load of GNUstep apps on top of HURD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
VMware, otoh, can never be free, since it includes Windows, as well as Windows licenses that are payable to M$.
That'd be like saying other virtualization tools can never be free because they include UNIX. Stallman wanted a Free alternative to UNIX, so he started GNU, and the various GNU variants (GNU/Linux, GNU/kFreeBSD, and GNU/HURD) can run in a Free virtualization tool (VirtualBox by Oracle). Others wanted a Free alternative to Windows, so they started ReactOS.
Is a normal universe now infinitely improbable?
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees
You reject it just because it's the thing to do. Because the herd does it. You do this to HURD in the same manner.
I don't speak for anyone but myself, but I reject HURD because it has turned into something of a joke. I reject it for the same reason I rejected Duke Nukem Forever...very little with that long a development cycle and that many technical problems and promises unkept are worth the time and trouble they've taken.
Were this a paid proprietary system, I would never give them the time of day, nor would I recommend them to anyone, until they've proven themselves abundantly.
Fortunately, this is a free project. I will laugh and sneer along with everyone else, and presume it is not worth the time of day, based on experience with other vapor ware that later released (none as epicly vaportastic as this, mind you...). When (or, as I feel is necessary to add, If) the HURD gets released, I will probably assume it is worthless on arrival...but I will still download and try it out, just like I do on occasion with Fedora, because I feel it is important to give these projects a chance, at least occasionally.
Looking through the list of comments on this post, though, I see a lot of people who have honest, non-trollish things to say about why they feel the HURD is in trouble, and where they think they failed. Granted, there are plenty of people just making jokes at HURDs expense (I admit...I laughed; you have to, sometimes even if it is at yourself).
I believe the old saying is "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water". There are a lot of irrelevant comments in here...people come here sometimes to blow off steam, or make some jokes. There are also a lot of very relevant commentary, if you are willing to dig a little.
Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different
No offense, but HURD is anything but new. Different, maybe; however, it being "in development" now for over 20 years makes it hard to even claim different. If it would just release, already, THEN we could maybe criticize it for being different!
In all seriousness, though, you are going to get people, in any community, opposed to something just because it is different. Sometimes this is a bad thing, but sometimes it means that a different idea has to show why it is valuable to break from working tradition before people will accept it. Personally, I'm all for trying something different, and I agree, I think it is a shame so many reject change so readily and completely.
Anyway, my point was, Slashdot is not irrelevant; don't take everything you read on it seriously, obviously, but don't dismiss everything here either.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
I read the about page, and it sounded like the reasons for its' existence were ideological (a GNU kernel is the last missing piece in a pure GNU OS), and possibly something to do with SMP, but it wasn't entirely clear if that was where they were going in the GNU Hurd "about us" page.
Not trolling, but can someone state the elevator pitch for GNU Hurd?