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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.
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 ?
To cause you angst.
It provides an alternative to the traditional monolithic UNIX kernel architecture by replacing it with a multiserver microkernel. Hurd is actually pretty interesting and useful project in my opinion. They just need much more developers if they want to actually go to the moon.
Why does the HURD exist?
To prove that the clean design of a micro kernel architecture enables the development of more features than can be achieved with an old-fashioned monolithic kernel, and that these features can be delivered on a faster schedule.
Too late, the desktop doesn't exist anymore.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Don't worry. At the rate they're going, they'll be up to 1.0 by 2030.
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.
Don't worry. At the rate they're going, they'll be up to 1.0 by 2030.
Or maybe 2059? Obligatory XKCD.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Yeah, if you use the pre/installed image it pretty much just works. The window manager is icewm.
Posted from my Hurd VM.
And here's the link for that: https://www.gnu.org/software/h...
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.
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!
Why would you want to work? Mobile devices are designed for consumption, not creation. Once all devices are mobile, will there be any content to consume?
The mobile devices all, pretty much, have cameras today. So, yes... There will still be cat videos. Eventually, they'll run on archaic hardware with software that nobody understands any longer, but they'll still host cat videos just fine until they all break, one by one, and nobody has the tools or the knowledge to repair or rebuild them.
Hmm... There's a novel in there, somewhere.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."