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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. I'll be interested in Hurd when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Systemd is ported

    1. Re:I'll be interested in Hurd when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Lennart Poettering, is that you?

      I don't think so. His post wasn't condescending.

  2. Wire, not write by Mr+Z · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to the release:

    The kernel now allows non-privileged users to wire a small amount of memory.

    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!