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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!