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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.
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 should I bother to use this kernel? What benefit would it give me over using just the regular Linux kernel or *BSD?
Its name is a mutually recursive acronym!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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/
But hey, he may get lauded by Tanenbaum for staying with a microkernel design.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
Actually RMS has said that development of the Hurd stalled largely because of the introduction of Linux, but that there was enough work already put in to it that that they didn't want to cancel it altogether.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-and-linux.html
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.
Not only did Stallman write EMACS, but he also wrote parts of GCC, the debugger, and gmake. These are not negligible contributions.
Isn't one of the "benefits that go with modularity" supposed to be that it's easier to write new kinds of modules (say, to support new hardware)?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
What a shallow comparison! There are people whose main motivation does not come from how much money they can make or how much power they can gain over others. RMS's motivation does not even remotely have anything to do with Bill Gates' motives or 'comparing of penis length' type rituals such as 'Who has had most influence on PCs?'
People who are mainly motivated by power and greed tend to ridiculde and diminish the achievements of these people. But in the long run, their rantings doen't count. In two hundred years from now people will very likely still read the novels of Thomas Pynchon, but absolutely nobody will give a fuck about the iPhone 5. (Apple and Microsoft will probably not even exist any longer in 200 years. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the free software movement will be alive and well in 200 years from now, even if it might have been outlawed by then.)
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.
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.
I used to work there too. This is complete and utter hogwash. We already had operating systems 50+ years ahead of even Solaris that we got from the Aliens in return for mending their crash-landed flying-saucers.
And that was at RAF Fairford in 1980, running on a special secret version of the Motorola 68000. To this day all NATO supercomputers run this hyperkernel on a military-spec 68k emulator on the bare metal.
Stick Men
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.
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.
Just to get things straight:
XNU (the Darwin kernel) utilises modules and message passing (signals), which is indeed a feature first pioneered in microkernels (by design). The current WinNT kernels do the same, and also call themselves "hybrid". Linux is almost there with modules and IPC signals.
All of this is, starting from a monolithic approach, 3% of the distance towards a microkernel (the 3% is arbitrarily thrown out, but you get the point: they are basically monolithic), and calling them "hybrid" is just trying to one-up everyone else.
And yep, OSX is nicely geared towards realtime, while in raw performance usually Linux is on top.
QNX is a real microkernel, but ad-hoc benchmarks ("real" benchmarks were never published) have shown its performance to be a fraction of modern operating systems. That's no problem though, as it has very low realtime latency, and that's what matters in its application area.
One of the most promising current microkernels is Fiaso.OC, a L4 fork I've been dabbling a bit with. It reaches 5%-50% of the Linux performance throughput in some classical applications, but can be faster in certain realtime scenarios.
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!
In a microkernel the device driver would be running as a lower priority process communicating with the rest of the operating system via message passing. Rather than running in the same CPU ring level of protection and potentially crashing the OS when you have a driver bug.
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.
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.
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!