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GNU Hurd 0.7 and GNU Mach 1.6 Released

Posted by timothy on from the give-the-kid-with-the-beard-more-candy dept.

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.

3 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hurd.. why? by darthsilun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Probably for much the same reasons that things like Haiku, OpenIndiana, DragonflyBSD, and etc., exist.
    Who are you to question what is interesting to someone? I don't mean that in a rude way, but honestly, something doesn't have to have millions of users to be someone's pet project or interesting to a small niche audience. After all, how do you think Linux got started?
    This might come as a shock, but the World does not revolve around you!

  2. Re:Hurd.. why? by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    if it takes them decades to catch up to Linux.

    How can you catch up to something that's moving by going slower than it? I mean I appreciate the extreme challenges of what they are doing, but they can utterly write off any idea of "catching up" at the rate they are going.

  3. Re:Hurd.. why? by Daemonik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's news for nerds and matters because nerds like obscure difficult to understand projects that will never be popular with "7|-|3 l0$3rs".