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GNU Hurd 0.7 and GNU Mach 1.6 Released
jones_supa writes: Halloween brought us GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6. The new Hurd comes with filesystem driver improvements, provides a new rpcscan utility, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer versions of GCC and GNU C Library. The Mach microkernel has updates for compiler compatibility, improvements to the lock debugging infrastructure, the kernel now lets non-privileged users write to a small amount of memory, timestamps are now kept relative to boot time, and there are various bugfixes. MIG 1.6 is a small update which improves compatibility with newer dialects of C programming language. Specific details on all of the updates can be found in the full release announcement.
jrepin adds some more details: The GNU Hurd 0.7 improves the node cache for the EXT2 file-system code (ext2fs), improves the native fakeroot tool, provides a new rpcscan utility, and fixes a long-standing synchronization issue with the file-system translators and other components. The GNU Mach 1.6 microkernel also has updates for compiler compatibility, improvements to the lock debugging infrastructure, the kernel now lets non-privileged users write to a small amount of memory, timestamps are now kept relative to boot time, and there are various bug-fixes.
Seriously, I want to use this on my laptop. When will this be doable? Almost forgets Hurd exists, would love to help out but *thumb*. Linus refusal to make Linux a GNU package is concerning.
Systemd is ported
Not a troll here.. really.. I followed Hurd in the beginning when i was really interested in the guts of OSs ( even wrote a couple toy ones ), but lost interest when it was moving at sub-snail pace.
Other than pure research, why is the project still going at all? Is there a practical value to the rest of us? Couldn't the efforts be focused somewhere that has a tangible benefit ?
The Linus Torvald's you know and love is but a figurehead puppet used by the open source conglomerates as clean shaven media representative. This man was born without birth certificates as part of a Middle Eastern slave harem and is commonly known as the Lunix Colonel.
The real Linus Torvald's has not left his mothers basement for 25 years. Nor has he shaved in this time. In March 1994 the Kernel was released as version 1.0.0 to celebrate Torvald's beard reaching 1 foot in length. 2 years later, largely due to a healthy diet of lutefisk they celebrated the milestone of 2 feet.
Unfortunately due to interference by corporate actors such as the Soviet conspiracy, Red Hat, the numbers became stagnated and no longer accurately reflected the true length of Torvald's beard. He was forced to trim.
This event caused Torvald's great sadness and resulted in him spiralling out of control into deep depression like parts of Mark Shuttleworth's Challenger spacecraft. He stopped showering for several years and this corresponding time period contained the greatest number of bugs in both the Linux kernel, and his beard.
The depression and lack of hygiene was contagious and spread to Open Source Wizard Richard Stallman who became known for his podiatric-auto-canibillia and was more likely to be associated with sores and sauce than source. The rival HURD kernel will never be completed as Stallman has forgotten how to program.
Torvald's mean while continued coding until his fingers bled, pushing code into his git under pseudonyms of various nerds around the world who paid the open source conglomerate to keep the sole Linux Mainframe online.
In 2011 Torvald's was able to wrestle control back over his versioning system and matched the released to the length of his beard for the 3rd time. This greatly improved the kernel and led to the development of some of the key technology of the 21st century: System D.
Seeing that his kernel was getting bigger, Torvald's began researching peer to peer Bitcoin block chains and Tor network services as a way to revolutionise the kernel for the first time since Al Gore invented the internet. System D was to use the one true linux mainframes hard drive to store pictures of Torvalds Penis, the system D version numbers were to reflect it's size at any time in some of the first research into Quantum computing versioning. After Jarrod from subway the initial angel investor due to seeing how this technology could be useful for his own interests, Google joined the project with the creation of it's D-wave computer - The first self contained and self replicating System D computer.
This caused a further rift between Stallman and Torvald's, as Linus had turned his operating system into a more advanced version of HERDs naming system. Many gnus were killed in the great battle of recursion.
In 2013 Torvald's beard had grown to a staggering 4 feet, as long as Eric S Raymonds was tall. This also marked the first time that Linux and System-D were the same thing as at the time Torvald's penis was 4 feet long.
Torvald's beard is currently approaching 4.3 feet long. He last had a shower this morning when he nearly got an erection and it is currently free from bugs.
Why does the HURD exist?
Will Hurd work if I installed it in Oracle VirtualBox? I'd like to try it out.
Linux will be on the desktop when GNU reach 1.0 mile stone ..
Wait, are they relative to boot time now or what?
Does 0.7 include support for VESA bus?
A couple of decades too late, but still sort of welcome.
That well may be the full answer, but is licensing minutiae a really good reason to develop an entirely parallel kernel?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Catching up? They are still making improvements to ext2 as their primary filesystem. For most modern use cases XFS or ext4 is being used. For high scalability, btrfs or ZFS is, basically, required.
If I were them I'd push btrfs hard.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
From the release notes:
>> The code has been updated to work with newer versions of the compiler
So.... GNU broke their compiler to the point that it wouldn't compile existing code; and then their other projects need to change their sources to work? Doesn't that seem horribly backwards?
Hurd is billed as being written in "assembly and C", but evidently it wasn't any sort of standardized assembly or C, it was some private variant that only GNU understood, and only GNU could compile. Now that GCC doesn't accept their non-standard code, they had to spend months rewriting everything in standardized form..... bizarre. Great use of the limited resources available.
But can it run Minesweeper?
I too wonder if there is any use case where it's a good fit? On the desktop Linux obviously has better hardware and software compatibility, but there's a use case for BSD, a use case (or two) for QNX, etc - is their one for Mach or Hurd? Is it super ultra reliable, or extremely fast because it's so small or ...?
If you're building a firewall machine, you don't care if it can run Gnome or not, and you don't care about video card support . Is there any type of build in which this kernel makes sense?
Won't boot in my Virtualbox VM, not as an image, or the installer. Not on IDE, or SATA (got a hint in one of the newsgroups). Never got past the bootloader.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
According to the release:
This is not a typo. Wiring memory means pinning it in memory so it cannot be paged out. This is potentially important both for security and real-time applications. On the security front, memory containing keys and passwords should be wired to prevent it going to disk. On the real-time front, if you can fit your working set in wired memory, you can be guaranteed you won't suffer a paging fault while you stay within that working set.
In Linux / POSIX systems, this is what mlock accomplishes.
Being able to write to memory, in contrast, isn't particularly noteworthy. You've been able to do that since pretty much the beginning...
Program Intellivision!
HURD versus Linux is pretty clear; HURD's a microkernel and Linux is not. What makes HURD interesting compared to Genode's L4 kernel? At a glance, they seem to be doing more similar things.
The most impressive seL4 guys already made a proven unhackable drone for the DARPA, with a separate sandboxed insecure application board and all.
Just wait a bit and applicability domain will grow exponentially until we finally get a proven Linux replacement.
They based their system on a microkernel design because it made the proof manageable, but of course as long as it's proven safe anything could be hooked into the kernel, so performance bottlenecks have a road for improvements too.
It's expensive to prove but they say since there's no bug overall development cost was less.
This looks too good to be true, and indeed I find it worrying that I've not heard Google & Co were massively investing?
Well, if not soon, then later
Here's wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
They beat you to it. It can already run Docker containers natively.