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."

Comments

Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Its fucking absurd that USB support and sound cards and SATA support is news in an operating system today.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Any user oriented system in development (as HURD clearly is) has to add support for USB, sound cards and SATA at some point. That is no reason for ridicule.
This particular project does development in an openly visible way, so you can see the daily progress. That is still no reason for ridicule.
This particular project progresses ... "very" ... slowly. That may or may not be a reason for ridicule, depending on your character.

Re:Absurd

[smash]

Yeah, but "some point" is usually fairly promptly. HURD has been in development for decades. USB has been out for over a decade. SATA has been out for about 8 years?

They can't expect people to support/develop/test it if it won't run on anything.

Re:Absurd

[DrXym]

I think it's fair game for ridicule. Hurd is the Duke Nuke'em Forever of kernels. It's incredible to think that it has been in development for 23 years. On the plus side the glacial pace of development, the lack of pragmatism, and the large dose of politics did have the positive benefit of motivating Linux into existence.

Re:Misguided

[wvmarle]

Being able to run on a somewhat modern computer (they all come with SATA drives and USB ports nowadays - no support for those two basic technologies means your kernel just won't work on any hardware that's not totally obsolete by now), and being able to actually use all the hardware in that computer, is a fairly important feature of a useable OS, imho.

Re:Why should I bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a microkernel, check Wikipedia.
Basically you will get clearly slower performance, but possibly much more reliability/stability, security, and all the benefits that go with modularity.
The point is that
a) computers will get so fast that the performance hit doesn't matter in standard programs
b) people hope to find ways of improving performance somewhat more into the direction of monolithic designs (=all the major platforms in use)
c) some application areas simply put additional stability over performance, so if we had a working microkernel... (no, Minix isn't good enough)

For now, best take it as a research project.

Re:Really, who cares?

[CRCulver]

I think Poor Richard has lived in an ivory tower far too long.

I hate to interrupt your Stallman bashing, but RMS isn't involved in Hurd development. He has been content to use Linux for many years now. Hurd development is driven mainly by other developers who are in it purely as a hobby, a way to play around with microkernel design, and they are not striving to reach a mass market.

GCC

[Skiron]

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.