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GNU Hurd Gets Improvements: User-Space Driver Support and More
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."
It also has security advantages, in that drivers don't run in ring zero can't access all memory.
Performance is less of a problem nowadays, because we have fast chips like the Pentium III.
As a rule, I support the idea of making a new OS just for the sake of it. But the important thing to realize most of these will never really get too far as in terms of market share.
Linux success was by luck. It came out when BSD had a lot of serious licencing issues and a big demand for something free, it was developed to a point of being useful fairly rapidly and got a lot of attention. At the same time the 32bit computers for home users were available, and people were jumping on getting a Real OS to do real work on. MS/DOS and Windows 3.1 wasn't a good option, for real work, other solutions just costed way too much money.
Hurd which was made during the same time BSD was having their issues, however it was more of am ambitious project, and couldn't get in during that opening which Linux did.
Now BSD with Free/Open/Net being based on original Unix code, came out of the Licencing mess as an open solution, with some still bad taste in peoples mouth. However they came out a bit more stable than Linux at that time. Where xBSD was being used in a business production settings, for a long time, while Linux matured and took over.
There is a lot of flamewars about GNU being superior then the new BSD license. Saying Linux is proof of this. I would disagree GNU and BSD are both Open Enough standards for general adoption, and Linux success was based on getting in at the right time. Otherwise you would expect HURD to be nearly as possible as BSD is now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
If you're going to disagree with the whole security community on a security issue, you might want to explain why.
Everybody I know who has any security credentials believes monolithic kernels are a security risk. I have about 20 years of security specialization, and I agree with that view.
If you have an IOMMU, your drivers belong outside kernel address space. If you don't have an IOMMU, you need to get one.
This does not imply that Hurd has done it right. I know nothing about that. It is possible to do it wrong.
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.
I really think you're wrong. QNX, for example, is an amazing, fast operating system. Microkernels make certain things difficult, but for all of those difficulties there are technical solutions. That HURD can't implement these is not the fault of the microkernel architecture.
"Your signature project has been in development hell for over 20 years, how do you respond?"
You're making stuff up. Making up things is generally known as lieing. I'll be generous and assume that you're merely staggeringly ignorant and perfer to regurgitate anti-GNU talking points you've culled from various message boards and have never bothered to actually find out much about the GNU project yourself.
The HURD kernel is not and has never been the "signature" project. The project is the GNU project (est. 1983) and has been progressing quite nicely. The kernel was not worked on until about 1990. When Linux came along in '91, it was rapidly adopted as the GNU kernel of choice, since it is under an appropriate license.
The goal is to be able to run computers entirely from copyleft software. The fact that some of these were achieved externally is neither here nor there. The GNU project has in fact achieved its major goal: you can now run a computer on completely copyleft software.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oh, shut up.
Windows Vista/7 still haven't even completely separated GUI from ring 0.
Last year had like 5 or 6 vulnerabilities messing with kernel mode to varying degrees simply by trying to display malformed images (and those vulnerabilities were all there at least since WinXP).
My favorite, for sheer WTF-ness, was "display an iframe of a very specific height - get a BSOD". You can find a bunch more by searching for "win32k.sys+(vulnerability|cve)"
User space driver's are one thing, but I'm still waiting for the day whe HURD gets a user.
NT itself is designed pretty well. It's the Win32 layer which is garbage.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.