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GNU Hurd To Develop SATA, USB, Audio Support
An anonymous reader writes "Hurd, the GNU micro-kernel project that was founded by Richard Stallman in 1983, may finally be catching up with Linux on the desktop... Plans were shared by its developers to finally bring in some modern functionality by working on support for Serial ATA drives, USB support, and sound cards. There are also ambitions to provide x86-64 CPU architecture support. GNU Hurd developers will be doing an unofficial Debian GNU/Hurd 'Wheezy' release this year but they hope for the Debian 'Jessie' release their micro-kernel in Debian will make it as part of some official CDs."
Finally, 2013 is the year of Hurd on the desktop!
Catching up to the last in the race is no achievement.
Its fucking absurd that USB support and sound cards and SATA support is news in an operating system today.
Why should I bother to use this kernel? What benefit would it give me over using just the regular Linux kernel or *BSD?
I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long. Ideals are laudable, but the world moves on and reality trumps pedantry every time. Bill Gates didn't get to be, well, Bill Gates - by trumpeting Basic and DOS until people started saying, "Who?" He cut corners and compromised and, ahem, borrowed good ideas. It made him a gazillion dollars. And Richard, for all I agree with your ideals, and for better or worse, Bill Gates influenced the course of development of the personal computer more than you ever will.
-- Norm Reitzel
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Is this a joke? I had to look at the date again, I thought it was 2003 again for a bit.
It's one thing to act all preachy. But real work happens when you start shoveling dirt. Stallman preaches benevolent communism, but he doesn't practice it. He prefers to be the one who talks, while OTHERS do the work. Ill never listen to anyone who chooses their job to be the easy one.
At this point, they may give Minix 3 a run for their money. Yee haw!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Will the documentation be written in LaTeX 3?
they hope for the Debian 'Jessie' release their micro-kernel in Debian will make it as part of some official CDs.
Sorry, but Hurd is being demoted to a second-class (ie, unofficial) port. The rules say that a port that fails to be included in two subsequent releases, gets moved to the debian-ports ghetto, with shining neighbours like hppa (long dead) or sh4 (never has been).
In some ways, that's a pity -- like, improving other code by forcing removal of buffer overflows/asinine truncations related to PATH_MAX. In others, well, it's Hurd...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It is good that Hurd is a live project regardless of how much production use it sees. It explores kernel design theory; valuable work in itself.
Still, I can't help a little ribbing.
founded by Richard Stallman in 1983,
Duke Nukem? Feh. Only took 15 years to go gold. Hurd is 30 and they just started working on sound cards.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Catching up with Linux on the desktop" by planning to implement USB and audio? I would think those would be bare minimum requirements for a desktop computer of _any_ kind, I doubt people would be impressed by a release of Windows that was lacking either... Even if the choice was Pulseaudio or no sound at all I would think people would still choose the former.
"HURD: Hairy Uncle Richard's Delusion."
I don't believe it's wise to spend scarce resources trying to add support for every new johnny-come-lately PC technology that may or may not pan out in the end.
Instead, it would be better to keep focused squarely on how to more perfectly isolate each functional element of the kernel from the other functional elements. There's always room for improvement in abstraction and isolation of intra-kernel services. This is what the Hurd needs to take the time to make sure they get right before they start adding random features.
Why does anything always have to do with practicality or use. Tinkering with new or old operating systems can be compared with learning and messing with new or old math or physics. I guess that when developing some USB drivers for hurd, you learn more than improving a given drivers for linux. The later is like reading and understanding and improving on a paper which is "well known", the former like breaking new grounds.
...unity ported to Plan 9!
HURD wasn't started till much later, in 1990: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurd The operating system of GNU was started in 1983, work on the kernel wasn't till much later.
http://mediagoblin.org/
Because "wheezy" is the codename for the upcoming Debian release, for all architectures, not just a specific system like the Raspberry Pi.
What, supporting physical hardware that I'm not free to inspect and modify? I would think that GNU/Hurd should be available only on open source hardware. You can get VHDL for a SPARC and all the interfaces. After all where do you draw the line.. binary blobs in drivers? embedded microcode?
Everything open and available to all for cost of copying.
mr reizel: if you've ever sat down and thought out a set of principles, then decided to stick to them no matter what happens, then you will understand. forget that it's about "software freedom" for a moment: just sit down and think, "have i ever actually come up with some principles, and am i prepared to dedicate my life to those principles and ethics"?
if the answer is "no" then for fuck's sake please stop criticising people who *have* decided that their principles are more important to them than any amount of money. because what you are saying is that we should not respect people who stick to their principles if there is money to be made. or obtained. or received. and i'm very alarmed that you clearly do not see that that's what you've said, otherwise you probably wouldn't have said it.
there's a little-known story that the linux kernel was first conceived by a small group of individuals in a military environment. they sat down, just after the "Unix Wars" and when Windows 3.1 came out, and they went [in summary], "shit. if this continues, windows - which we can see is a pile of shit even without the NSA or GCHQ looking at it, because we know about things like virtual memory - is going to be taken up in our secure environments merely because it's $100 not $10,000 and then foreigners will be able to go for a stroll through any of our government files".
[fast-forward btw to a recent complaint a few years back from a U.S. Senator about why the NSA punishes microsoft by not allowing windows to be installed on any of its office machines....]
back to the story: one of the individuals, a norweigan major, was then tasked to go off and "groom" any individual that he could find who had the potential to create a full "Free" operating system. the person he found: Linus Torvalds. you should be able to work out the rest of the picture.
now, i don't know if you're aware of this but many of the fears that that small group had have in fact already come true. i worked at NC3A (NATO Research) a few years ago: i was shocked to find that *every* single desktop system ran Windows NT (XP). which is absolutely insane - and that's in a military research environment. the reason: they were sold on a minor item - $USD 5m and MS "Office" licenses thrown in for free.
and this was just around the time when that Sony BMG "root kit" was doing the rounds. U.S. Military staff, bored of staring at nothing, would put a CD into the computer, and a complete list of classified files on that machine would be shipped over the internet to a server run by Sony.
i'm mentioning "military" because it should have obvious immediate ramifications where money should *not* be a deciding factor in the equation, but you can see clearly that it quite obviously has been, and the consequences of various Military instituations around the world *not* sticking to their principles - out of sheer ignorance or monetary over-ride - are very serious.
but the point being made applies just as equally to everyone else in a *non* military environment: you really really cannot trust proprietary software. you've seen enough dilbert cartoons to know why.
so that's the software freedom aspect dealt with. i'd best do the other bit in another post.
I wonder why they picked that name...
It's a tribute to Isabel Sanford
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
mr reizel: i did a prior post covering the software freedom aspect of what you wrote, but it's just as important to recognise that the linux kernel is a one-man show, effectively. if you don't like what mr linus has to say, then tough shit.
the GNU/Hurd project is therefore a fall-back - a safety net, so to speak. unfortunately it deviates from even what FreeBSD does, in its layout and presentation at userspace level [because it uses RPC message-passing between kernel and userspace], so they've given themselves a bit more to chew than the handful of people involved in it could really handle. fortunately however there is plenty of device driver code kicking around that they can bootstrap themselves up from.
they've achieved a hell of a lot. so please give them some encouragement - and preferably some money.
For anybody who knows a little bit about Debian (which is what this article is about, after all), your comment sounds terribly uninformed.
Here's a link for you, check the codenames...
Please don't flame this guy, he's just asking :)
The upcoming release of Debian has been known as Wheezy for...what, two years now?
Sorry, but development time is a scarce resource. We have real problems to solve.
I for one find missing support for SATA, USB and sound to be real problems.
Roll on 2004!
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
As hardware becomes more and more powerful, the efficiency of an operating system reduces in importance, because its overheads become less visible as a percentage of the work done. If the inefficient design provides some structural benefits (and microkernels have many), then this can be a worthwhile tradeoff.
He said problems in software people actually use.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Agreed. At least Linux desktop would hugely benefit from bug fixes rather than coming up with new wild concepts.
having hurd that HURD would catch up now I feel my memory is hurting .. for the 5th ? or so time ..
sorry guys & girls but I think for you not having been on the internet GNU/Hurd is the "ultimate" vaporware or better virtual reality ware,
because it really exists but you virtually can't do anything with it except using it to understand, learn and devellop, and that's what many long bearded people (mostly men) do,
You can do it, it will achieve nothing but your own pleasure, -> masturbation -
So I think it's good that Hurd exists.
If they continue like this they'll catch up wit ReactOS in less than five years
I know that HURD has been the butt of our jokes for a while. Even if you get it to run, it's painfully slow. However, these problems are not inherent to the microkernel architecture, since QNX is lightning fast and is very much microkernel-based. The downfall of HURD was that the processes kept the CPU occupied with message passing rather than actually running programs. QNX figured out how to minimize these overheards. I can be done. RIM (now "Blackberry") bought QNX and closed the source code, which is sad, but it hasn't destroyed the sound rationalle for microkernels.
raspberry pi's raspbian code name 'wheezy' COMES FROM DEBIAN. not the other way around. 'wheezy' was announced by debian devs in sept 2010. raspbian 'wheezy' was released last summer, replacing its previous version which was codenamed 'squeeze' -- wonder where *that* came from?
What happens when leftist developers don't rip off UNIX, Windows or MacOSX.
read it and wheep. you responded to someone that closed with this line. no not the fact that people vote with their US dollars, but that their vote doesn't mean anything to a currency-eating legal animal. could Bill Gates have been THAT much of influence on PC's without money? I keep hearing of Russian scientists in frozen countries building computers with wood and string, so how did Bill Gates influence PC development? He built MS Windows on top of Dos for nearly 20 years, then released enough MS Windows that it kicked out compatibility, begining with DOS competitors Novel and IBM and Caldera. What about influence as in how Intel (an Israel corporaion) stole (American company) Digital Equipment Company's Alpha patents and stifled the entire world under inferior x86 technology for 15 years whiled count'em 5 other American computer hardware system companies whithered as SGI and MIPS and Sun and Atarii and Commodore... This prior 20 years of computing lost more American jobs, destroyed more industry founders, stole more tech to distant countries having nothing but thievery and murder in their heritage and family backgrounds.
And then there is this dirty filthy fuck writing shit like this. Beam. Me. Up.
Poor Richard everyday wrote in his almanac that he got up and got dressed and went to bed, and did better than everyone else. hello.jpg to you too, Norm Reitzel.
Even if this "new wild concept" is simply trying to implement an architecture that has been seen as the holy grail of operating system design since its inception?
If they're not being paid for it, they can develop what they want. If someone is going to pay them to do things, like fix Linux bugs, then it would probably be a different story
Without USB support, this kernel would be immune from viruses spread on USB drives. Iran may have been planning to switch to this kernel for security.
RMS is The Man behind Hurd; it's as much a single-origin project as is Linux - and if he did as much work, and were as effective a leader/manager generally, as Linus, Hurd would probably be the bleeding-edge OS right now.
But he'd rather yell half-nonsense about Freedom Über Alles and eat his toe jam. Just sayin'.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
But real work happens when you start shoveling dirt. Stallman preaches benevolent communism, but he doesn't practice it.
Who shipped Emacs and GCC?
RMS coded GCC by himself - it was only later others got on board:
GCC history
And. of course, if it wasn't for RMS and GCC. Linus would not have been able to get a 'free' compiler for his project.
RMS is the seed of all of this. Don't knock him or his values. It is why we have a great 'free' OS (in all it's varieties) today.
For starters, you need a compiler... something like gcc might work, I suppose... who wrote that thing? Oh, yeah, it was some Richard Stallman guy, starting in 1983 or thereabouts. ;)
Is English your first language? Just asking.
only about three decades after everyone quit caring about it.
...which was codenamed 'squeeze' -- wonder where *that* came from?
They're all Toy Story characters
from Wikipedia:
The code names of Debian releases are names of characters from the film Toy Story. The unstable, development distribution is permanently nicknamed sid, after the emotionally unstable next-door neighbor boy who regularly destroyed toys. The release after squeeze will be named wheezy, after the rubber toy penguin in Toy Story 2. The release after wheezy will be named jessie, after the cowgirl in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3.
Seriously, the Hurd guys either need to get with it, or just quit. It is stupid to have something this completely out of date and keep pretending like it'll be relevant. No, if you want your kernel to have any chance at relevance it needs to support modern features. Yes, that means SATA, x64, and so on. None of these are new things, by any stretch of the imagination.
If they lack the resources or drive to get this kind of thing done in a timely fashion, then just let it go. There is no point to releasing a kernel 10+ years out of date (as the parent points out, SATA hit in 2003) particularly when there are plenty of options that ARE up to date.
Can you even find used hardware for sale CL that does not have one of these? I seriously hope this is all volunteer work. Since Duke finally shipped (sorta), I suppose we do need a new name for a horribly disorganized development project.
Why don't they fork Linux, remove all the blobs and call it the Hurd kernel?
Probably because like most of GNU, it's mismanagement is fanatical, snail-paced and a circle jerk.
There are what, maybe 30 people on earth that give a shit about Hurd at this point?
But Linux is already GPL. Even if somehow, all Linux developers were to magically agree to switch a future version of Linux to, say, BSDL, current Linux versions that are being used would still be GPL, and still usable by the GNU guys (e.g. Stallman's own favorite GNewSense, which stopped being upgraded a while ago, but is simply maintained. So HURD isn't needed as a backup plan. The reason it would be good to have HURD would be that finally, the FSF guys can have a complete OS all their own, and stop telling people to call it GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux or GNU&&Linux or whatever it is Stallman feels like calling it one day.
If anybody needs a backup plan, it's Linux. As more and more parts of the GNU userland become GPL3 or later, Linux becomes less & less attractive from a licensing POV for those who can live w/ GPL2, but start jettisoning stuff after GPL3. As it is, Apple, FreeBSD and Minix have had LLVM/CLang replace GCC as their default compiler, and it's just a matter of time before Linux using companies start considering this option. Similarly, Apple has dropped Samba, and the moment a more liberally licensed alternative is available, others may as well.
Adding support for sound cards doesn't mean Hurd has caught up with anything but the mid to late 1980s. Both Mac and PCs had support for this sort of functionality in the 1980s (1984 for the first Mac, 1989 for the first Soundblaster).
Yo dawg! I heard you like hurd, so I put a hurd in your herd so you can herd while you hurd!
"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." - Bernard Baruch
Yes, and the stable version has been known as "Squeeze". And that should be changing later this year, when the upcoming version of Debian will be "Jessie" and the stable version will be "Wheezy." The experimental branch is always "Sid" (named after the character of the same name in Toy Story who blows up and otherwise mangles toys).
When I first heard that prediction a desktop computer was more than a thousand times slower and only had one core. There are still plenty of situations where people are sitting and waiting for CPU bound processes to finish and asking "are we there yet?" like small children in a car.
Can you see now why I see it as a useless and misleading non-answer for about why a loss of performance doesn't matter?
Instead it's better to be honest and state what you get for the performance hit instead of pretending it's not going to matter.
Kernels are called monolithic even if they are made up of a collection of modules that are loaded as needed - it's an architecture description not a file description.
``I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)..''
- Linus Torvalds, 1991
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That's right - let's hail him for denying software writers the right to determine what terms & conditions their software can be sold under. There is another terms for this - slavery. The person works for a certain effort, and then doesn't have the right to decide what license it should have? No wonder RMS thinks so highly of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. It's good that people like Tim O'Reilly & Eric Raymond, as well as Torvalds himself, distance themselves from this wacko.
Phew. What did it run on beforehand, toaster ovens?
Hurd is maligned and far behind, but its always nice to have a backup. If Linux ever gets crazy, you need a fallback.
On top of using the archaic and slow Mach and having failed on attempts to move past that, HURD's an hybrid system, not a pure microkernel system. They're running their drivers in kernelspace.
Ironically, there's a free hybrid system much younger than the HURD which already has USB and AHCI: https://www.haiku-os.org/
To get a feel of how nasty Mach is, I recommend grabbing the slides from this talk:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/microkernel_overhead.html
Here's three actually free interesting microkernel and multiserver systems with a pure microkernel architecture (drivers are isolated) which are actively developed and have reached major milestones recently:
Genode: http://genode.org/
HelenOS: http://www.helenos.org/
Minix3: http://www.minix3.org/
Any of them three is more interesting than the HURD. Moreover, they mostly have support for AHCI and USB and run on more than just 32bit x86.
At first, my excuse was "I'll do it when we have a black president mom", believing that we will never have a black president.
Then Obama came along, forcing me to change my line to "I'll do it when Duke Nukem Forever is released, mom".
I was sure DNF was never going to be released. Then one day, I saw the headlines: "DNF is on stores". WTF? this too, after Obama?
But now I got a 100% certain thing: "I'll do it mom, but when HURD is released!"
Come on HURD devs, do not dissapoint us. Don't you ever dare finish it!
I always replace "H" with "T" in this case.
I don't know about Arch, but Debian is a professional organization - non-profit, maybe, but professional. They don't embark on such projects unless they are serious about it. They decided that they want to have projects covering all operating systems out there (except perhaps Windows) and so they have projects like kFreeBSD, HURD and various ports of Linux (they are the only surviving Linux distribution for Itanium).
If you polish a turd, you're still left with a turd.
Plans and ambitions is all that lot have got nowadays.
I for one find missing support for SATA, USB and sound to be real problems.
While sound might be arguable (you can do a lot of useful work without it), without storage and input devices you've got electronic junk. SATA and USB (at least to support a keyboard, though a pointing device would also be nice) are really necessary in order to get the OS set up and usable, even if that use is over the network.
Unless they're planning to have everyone connect over an RS-232 serial line and restrict everyone to using disk hardware interconnect that is virtually gone...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"