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GNU Hurd Gets Improvements: User-Space Driver Support and More

Posted by samzenpus on from the now-even-better dept.

jones_supa writes "At FOSDEM 2014 some recent developments of GNU Hurd were discussed (PDF slides). In the name of freedom, GNU Hurd has now the ability to run device drivers from user-space via the project's DDE layer. Among the mentioned use-cases for the GNU Hurd DDE are allowing VPN traffic to just one application, mounting one's own files, redirecting a user's audio, and more flexible hardware support. You can also run Linux kernel drivers in Hurd's user-space. Hurd developers also have working IDE support, X.Org / graphics support, an AHCI driver for Serial ATA, and a Xen PV DomU. Besides the 64-bit support not being in a usable state, USB and sound support is still missing. As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop (GNOME and KDE soon) and Firefox web browser."

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. HURD is an embarrassment by realmolo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Having a project like HURD reflects poorly on Open Source/Free software. It's kind-of emblematic of the major problem with non-commerical software projects; namely, without a central guiding force and a *real* budget, big software projects have a very difficult time getting finished.

    Stallman should just kill it. It's pointless.

    1. Re:HURD is an embarrassment by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Having a project like HURD reflects poorly on Open Source/Free software.

      Rubbish. It's a hobby/research project for a few people at the moment. This no more reflects poorly on Open Source software than my crap github account.

      Stallman should just kill it. It's pointless.

      Tell you what, I'll petition Stallman to ask them to stop (RMS doean't have to power to tell people what to do in their spare time and I doubt he'd weald it if he did) if you agree to cease all your hobbies since you're not pro-level at any of them.

      That aside, it's actally beginning to get to the interesting stage. Things are beginning to work quite well. It's soon going to be able to use all of the Linux drivers (i.e. no hardware support problems). The capabilities are interesting because it can do all of this without hacks or root. This gives a much smaller attack surface.

      It's also interesting because the difficult and complex security concious important system code can be written in something other than C very easily. In facy you can cobble together all sorts of stuff in all sorts of languages if desired.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:HURD is an embarrassment by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But Linux *didn't* exist when Hurd was started. It was the moribund state of development 23 years ago which motivated Linus to write his own kernel. So in a sense we should thank Hurd for being so badly mismanaged, mired in politics and kernel correctness that it drove someone to produce something better and more useful. Pragmatism won the day.