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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
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.
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.
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!