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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!
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.
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?
Wow, so in this thread we have one person who personally blames RMS for Hurd being the way it is, and immediately afterwards a reply saying that RMS doesn't do any real work anyway. Which is it?
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
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.
Wow, so in this thread we have one person who personally blames RMS for Hurd being the way it is, and immediately afterwards a reply saying that RMS doesn't do any real work anyway. Which is it?
They're not mutually exclusive. If a project leader spends all his time bloviating instead of working on the project, that can explain lack of project progress. (Note: I really don't know to what extent this is the case here, just saying...)
...unity ported to Plan 9!
Wow, so in this thread we have one person who personally blames RMS for Hurd being the way it is, and immediately afterwards a reply saying that RMS doesn't do any real work anyway. Which is it?
It's both.
"Hurd, the GNU micro-kernel project that was founded by Richard Stallman in 1983
Stallman never had in any interest in doing any real work and that is, at least partially ,why Hurd is what is it.
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.
He already did that. It's called emacs.
Umm, both? If Stallman actually put some work into in, Hurd would probably be a functioning OS by now.
Presuming he has the skills, of course.
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.
Not only did Stallman write EMACS, but he also wrote parts of GCC, the debugger, and gmake. These are not negligible contributions.
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.
And ... thank you for not posting that video of Stallman "eating something from his foot".
It's gotten old.
True, but the nausea it induces is forever. When I need to vomit, thinking about that scene works better the a finger down the throat.
I expect that will be the case for years to come.
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.
So he hasn't written any software for about 30 years then? Sounds about right.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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
Stallman is an eccentric personality who finds it difficult to relate to people and feels most comfortable around computers. I'd imagine that for him coding would be "the easy job", while taking on the role of public speaker and advocate for Free Software is probably a cross to bear rather than an escape from the hard work.
I wonder if a nice addition would also be to convert the source to C++? Maybe to help with maintainability without causing much of a performance overhead.
You'd be surprised how often Stallman's name appears in a Man page for something REALLY useful in Linux. The only reason you don't hear about more recent projects from him is because a lot of the stuff he's written follows the UNIX ideology of giving people a lot of really small tools that can be combined in unique and useful ways.
Granted none of the stuff his name appears on works outside of the terminal, but 50% of my day in Linux is spent in a terminal because I do embedded development. The guy's tools just work, which is great.
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.
You draw the line as deeply as you can while still being able to make forward progress moving it downward, and accumulating popularity has some value too. Saying you shouldn't work on free software/hardware unless it achieves 100% free at every level means you'll never get anywhere. GNU tries to advance on multiple development layers when it can, but it can't completely ignore the economics of mass production.
Catching up to the last in the race is no achievement.
Wrong - catching up with the last in the race is a great achievement - you've just managed to bypass the rules of logic.
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.
Actually, he has abandoned HURD, declaring Linux to be the kernel for the FSF, and pushing Libre-Linux lately. The people doing HURD are doing it w/o him. But if they complete it, it will be the first GPL 3 OS ever created, and the FSF would have something to be thankful for. Of course, the fact that it was 20 years in the making is another story.
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
Precisely! Maybe debut it either on Loongson or Alwinner, or on OpenRISC.
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.
When the hell does he find time to do that? He spend a lot of his time answering people's emails. In fact most, I think.
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. ;)
He already did that. It's called emacs.
Oooo!
So a GENERATION ago, he wrote a TEXT EDITOR.
Wow.
Oh, and even worse than that; he wrote a text editor with an incredibly non-intuitive and sometimes even DANGEROUS command-set.
A developer friend of mine was editing some C source in emacs, when he somehow finger-flubbed a command that not only UPPERCASEd his ENTIRE source; but then SAVED WITHOUT PROMPTING.
To this day, he won't touch emacs. Can't say as I blame him.
Hell, even the OS X "Aqua-fied" emacs is nearly impossible to use. It doesn't matter HOW "powerful" something is (especially something like a TEXT EDITOR, for fuck's sake!), if you have to spend YEARS learning it.
What happens when leftist developers don't rip off UNIX, Windows or MacOSX.
There's something to be said for this. There are things that open source development does not do well. Designing tight, elegant systems from scratch is one of them. The Hurd crowd started hacking on Mach. That sucked. Then they tried L4. That didn't work. Then they tried Coyotos. That didn't work.
The QNX kernel is about 60K bytes of x86 code. Writing a microkernel is not about writing a lot of software. It's about writing a small amount of very well designed software. The hack and patch approach doesn't work for that.
Catching up to the last in the race is no achievement.
Wrong - catching up with the last in the race is a great achievement - you've just managed to bypass the rules of logic.
Or you're a whole lap ahead!
Not only did Stallman write EMACS, but he also wrote parts of GCC, the debugger, and gmake. These are not negligible contributions.
So if you're reading a guy's job application, and it shows he did a significant amount of really good work in the 1990s but, since then, he hasn't been able to add even basic functionality to a more modern project... Do you hire him? Does he even get an interview?
#DeleteChrome
So if you're reading a guys post, and it shows that he created a Slashdot account in the 1990s, but since then, he hasn't been able to add even a basic amount of value to a modern thread, do you reply to him?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
Never used emacs, but it may be more beneficial for that to have been a lesson to use version control instead of a lesson to not use emacs.
You'd be surprised how often Stallman's name appears in a Man page for something REALLY useful in Linux. The only reason you don't hear about more recent projects from him is because a lot of the stuff he's written follows the UNIX ideology of giving people a lot of really small tools that can be combined in unique and useful ways.
Granted none of the stuff his name appears on works outside of the terminal, but 50% of my day in Linux is spent in a terminal because I do embedded development. The guy's tools just work, which is great.
Not directly, but many of them contain bindings for running in GUI frameworks. gdb is a good example.
The debugger being the only piece of software for which people haven't built an alternative yet.
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
A developer friend of mine was editing some C source in emacs, when he somehow finger-flubbed a command that not only UPPERCASEd his ENTIRE source; but then SAVED WITHOUT PROMPTING.
Did he try C-_ ? I haven't made an editing error that's not possible to undo with emacs yet... And yes, it can cause big things you didn't mean to if you enter wrong key combo - anyone who knows emacs knows this and has decided to use it despise that. If they don't know how to *undo an editing command* then that's just stupid - to use emacs for anything important that is. In fact using any editor without knowing how to undo would be.
To this day, he won't touch emacs. Can't say as I blame him.
I would blame myself, were I him.
Hell, even the OS X "Aqua-fied" emacs is nearly impossible to use. It doesn't matter HOW "powerful" something is (especially something like a TEXT EDITOR, for fuck's sake!), if you have to spend YEARS learning it.
It didn't take me one year to learn use it more powerfully than other editors I had tried. My general take on editor wars is: *pffft* - but blaming editor for it's features - instead of just deciding that those features have cons that make it not good for you personally - is just silly. Not saying that all your arguments were just that - but your main ones seemed to be.
Yeah, I like emacs, as you probably guessed, but it's rare for me to enter any editor war kind of talk even this deeply. I'll probably regret it.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
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.
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.
Maybe he had nothing to say.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
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).
I haven't added value in years, but people keep replying to me.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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'!"