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GNU Hurd Begins Supporting Sound, Still Working On 64-bit & USB Support (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: GNU developer Samuel Thibault presented at this weekend's FOSDEM conference about the current state of GNU Hurd. He shared that over the past year they've started working on experimental sound support as their big new feature. They also have x86 64-bit support to the point that the kernel can boot, but not much beyond that stage yet. USB and other functionality remains a work-in-progress. Those curious about this GNU kernel project can find more details via the presentation media.
Thanks to the microkernel architecture you will no longer have to reboot system just to get rid of that stale lock on an accidentally removed USB disk or unmountable --bind mount in /proc/mounts due to non-existing user/usecount or due to some crashed driver locking up your PCI device etc. I could transparently restart crashed ntfs.sys emulated under Linux in 2003 while Linux kernel still can't do that with its native filesystems.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1508/
Hurd is not a kernel program - it is the name of a platform that is made up of many little programs. Hurd's purpose is to replace the traditional Unix kernel. The idea of Hurd is that any user program compiled for Unix can easily work inside Hurd. The name of the kernel that runs underneath Hurd is called GNU Mach. GNU Mach is a microkernel and is very mature for the i686 architecture while x64 architecture is currently in development.
Now you say, why don't they replace Systemd in Lisp? Well Systemd is an OS management system. Hurd has no need for such a system that supervises the OS to segregate concerns and route system access. The microkernel/multi-server approach of GNU Mach/Hurd inherently means that such a supervisor is completely superfluous.