Slashdot Mirror
GNU/Hurd Web Server Online
Ross Vandegrift writes "Jeff Baily sent an email to the Hurd development list today announcing he has put up a GNU/Hurd webserver. Not much content there, but the fact that it is up is incredible alone. Keep up the good work Hurd! "
When slashdot descends,
Experimental box is
A smoking crater.
The default config if you have a lancity on Rogers is usually as such. I know people in BC and ON who both have the exact same 47KB/s uplink limit -- but yes, service does differ as per locality.
Here in BC, (and probably elsewhere too), Rogers has a clause in the @Home license that really makes me uneasy.
I'm just pulling figures out of my a**, but after the first gigabyte of transfer per month they may charge you with $1.00 CDN/100 kBytes. I've never heard of it being enforced, but I know they could send me a bill for several thousand dollars on a fairly quiet month. Ulp!
(If anyone can verify this and come up with some proper figures, I'd be much obliged. I can't find my bill anywhere. Secondly, this could probably be thrown out since it hasn't been enforced, but IANAL.)
Yup, it couldn't handle the stampede of slashdotters (sorry couldn't resist)
Jilles
here's the dump from netcrafts query page :
Sorry, couldn't determine what the server was for host hurd.zugzug.com on port 80.
interesting to see that netcraft couldnt determine the server.
If you don't already know this, propietary software isn't the same as commercial software. And ask how the people at Red Hat feed their children.
You are seeing software as a product to be sold. I see software as knowledge to be learned and experimented with. Yet scientists all over the world are being hired and are feeding thier children. At no point does a scientist say, "Let me propietize my discoveries and forbid anyone sharinng this information."
There is nothing insulting about saying GNU/Linux. I have looked at all the GNU software I use and it makes sense to call it GNU/Linux. But if people want to call the system Linux, go ahead. I just fear people will forget about GNU and freedom if we all called it just Linux.
Please don't speak of GNU, GNU/Linux, or Debian in a derogatory manner.
Otherwise, I think we have reached an impasse.
Your company can sell all the software you want. I just ask it to be free (as in free speech). If you don't, I will buy my software elsewhere.
Also you assume (college == get a good job).
If you can make a living fliping hamburgers than why not? My plan is to get my degree and do exactly that. Or perhaps some other job. But I will still have my free time and perhaps I will do something I love other than making a superfluous amount of money.
There are at least two major innovations of the FSF. First is a multi-language cross platform compiler. I know of no other that exists. The second is the copyleft and the GPL.
Calling a system GNU/Linux means that it is the GNU system based on a Linux kernal. I see no insult to that. What greater insult it there in calling a system GNU/Linux than just Linux? I would say it is just the opposite.
Can I ask to to back up some of your wild assumtions?
This is one the reasons free software/open source is so much more like knowledge. Didn't Isaac say that he could reach new heights by standing on the shoulders of giants... Let me see that happen with propietary software :)
:)
plug:
I wrote about this very thing in The Rise and Fall of OS Empires. It was also a subtle argument against BeOS
/plug
DOS and Linux were very different, while Hurd and Linux are very similar.
;-)
I think you need to learn a little more about the Hurd before making a statement like that. Start by reading some of the other posts on this thread
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
That's the way I think it will go.
I may end up developing propietary software. But that will not prevent me from writing free software. It will also not prevent me from demanding free software. Many people must develop propietary software. There is nothing wrong with that. The revolution has only begun.
The only FSFware I ever use is the compiler.
That is hard to beleive. GNU is so pervasive in "Linux" operating system that it makes more sense to call it GNU/Linux. Besides, Linux is a kernal, the rest is mostly GNU.
Take a look at http://www.gnu.org/software sometime. I counted well over a hundred commonly used software packages there sometime in just the GNU section. Including GNU Bash, GNU Window Maker, GNU Emacs, GNU elvis, GNOME, glibc, etc. Are you sure you don't use any of these or other software on the GNU software map?
GNU is a complete system except for the kernal. That doesn't mean added software makes it not GNU.
*But* Linux still has many more years of development behind it than HURD.
Actually, that's not quite true. In fact, I think that the Hurd has been around longer than Linux. The problem as I understand it is that it's an experimental design, and they keep deciding to throw out or rewrite parts of the system, whereas Linux is based on the well-known Unix kernels. Recently there seems to be a significant amount of forward progress, and I wouldn't be surprised if things get a lot better over the next year. Or they might not
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Any POSIX conformant system will have essentially the same API. By that way of thinking, OpenMVS, OpenVMS, Solaris, AIX, Irix, Tru64 Unix, BSD, Linux, and yes, even the crippled NT subsystem seems quite similar. If the Hurd attempts to conform to the POSIX spec, then it would seem very similar to Linux or Solaris or BSD, which also make the same attempt. write(2) and read(2) et alia are pretty much the same everywhere. MS-DOS, on the other hand, seems quite different, because it is not standards conforming.
Of course, to someone hacking on the kernel source code, you, Daniel, are completely correct. A regular Unix kernel hacker will look for a long time for bdevsw in something running on top of a microkernel and never find it.
It's really a matter of perspective.
He's on rogers, the have static ip's more or less. His uplink is also likely 47KB/s.
In sum, HURD seems to be a failed attempt of the FSF to totally conquer the Open Source world, an attempt doomed from the start. In truth, they are about five-ten years too late.
I doubt the FSF are trying to conquer. In fact they *invented* open source/free software after everything turned propietary. And every Linux-based system uses GNU so they in fact have conquered the open source world as much as Linux has. So I don't think the FSF need to conquer the "open source world". They already have.
Hurd will hopefully provide a worthy successor to the great kernal Linux is.
Since he's on rogers, his uplink is more or less fixed.. Doesn't matter anyway though, far more traffic goes by which could be classified under quake/half-life/whatever servers and warez.. :)
Naw, traffic is managed through QOS, most likely using ONAdvantage. Therefore one user can't use all the traffic on a segment himself -- unless of course, no one else is trying to do anything.
Most rogers users (his MSO) have lancity modems and they have a fixed uplink of around 47KB/s (well, backbone and local problems aside).
It's nice to see another OS (kernel) design is still being worked on - people seem to get so caught up in the Linux/Windows war that they forget that there are several other designs that offer benefits of their own.
I'll certainly give a full HURD distro (say, Debian HURD) a good try should it ever make near-completion.
I was very careful to say "after everything went propietary". They invented the term "free software".
Apache, Perl, Python, Sendmail, Tcl, and XFREE86 are just a few of the important projects that are unrelated to the FSF.
These are free software projects. Some of these sprang from the free software movement. Some of these sprang from the open source movement which came from the free software movement. Some of these just wanted a "you do whatever you want with this just keep my name on it" license.
Okay. I guess saying that the FSF invented free software is somewhat less than correct but it is close. I am sorry. No need to be hostile.
1 276 ms 28 ms 27 ms aggro-80.lvcm.com [24.234.80.1]
2 25 ms 30 ms 22 ms edge.lvcm.com [24.234.0.1]
3 217 ms 70 ms 22 ms H4-0-0.irv-lvg100.gw.eni.net [207.168.88.1]
4 40 ms 42 ms 42 ms noname.eni [155.229.120.157]
5 239 ms 29 ms 49 ms bb3.mae-w.home.net [198.32.200.47]
6 42 ms 42 ms 356 ms c1-pos3-3.snfcca1.home.net [24.7.66.45]
7 332 ms 57 ms 55 ms c1-pos4-0.sttlwa1.home.net [24.7.66.1]
8 54 ms 62 ms 317 ms bb1-pos2-0.rdc1.bc.home.net [24.7.72.174]
9 265 ms 66 ms 65 ms 10.0.186.114
10 * * * Request timed out.
11 * * * Request timed out.
True, every Linux-based operating system uses some of the FSF's software; viz. the compiler. But some uses far less than you allege. Consider David Parsons's work, for example.
I will not claim that all Linux based systems use GNU but the vast majority do. All major distributions use vast amounts of GNU software. I am certain that your main system use a lot of GNU software.
Linux is hardly about the FSF, you know.
This depends on what you think Linux is about. The FSF is about free software (open source). I would say they are about similar things.
But I do give the FSF the credit for the Free Software and Open Source movements as we know them. If it wasn't for the FSF, none of this would be possible.
Periodically, someone comments that warnings should be sent to admins of systems whose systems are linked to from here, just in case the load is too much. But linking to a system running an experimental operating system should probably fall somewhere under premeditated assault.. ;-)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Your point about speed is completely specious, I'm afraid.
The ability of the PentiumII/III architecture to parallelize certain tasks (via having multiple execution units; the Pentium could do this in a limited way, and all modern chips such as SPARC or Alpha or PPC also do this) does not mean your processor can run multiple tasks at once.
Let me quantify that a bit better: each process (and processes and threads are very close to the same on all Unices, but running NT won't help you in this case) requires its own complete context, consisting of register values on the processor and page tables maintained by the OS. Since the processor only has one set of registers and only one program counter, it can only be executing one thread of instructions at a time. It can parallelize only in a very small local area around the PC. This speeds up execution of the current instruction thread, since you can get other things done (i.e. evaluate other non-dependent instructions) while waiting for a particularly slow instruction to finish. But it doesn't speed up multiple threads.
In fact, context switches (required to switch threads) are very expensive. You have to save out all the register values, load new ones, and bring up new page tables. In addition, unless the two threads happen to be working on the same chunk of memory, all the cache data will have to be thrown out (a significant slowdown).
I'm not arguing that Be is not fast, I know it is. And I'm sure it's possible to take excellent advantage of SMP with microkernels. But there's no way to do single-processor threading on your typical processor (of course you are free to build yourself a processor capable of whatever you want). Period. Sorry.
No, my main system is a Sparc running OpenBSD. Scant little FSF software there. Just the compiler. The rest is free.
Very well.
More importantly, you have a logical fallacy. Just because the Linux kernel is free software, and just because the FSF is about free software, does not mean that Linux is about the FSF, nor vice versa. Aristotle would not be pleased.
I didn't mean to make a logical implication or any other implication. But if you want a syllogism, then very well.
Is that a fallacy? I hope not. I don't think so. Given that Linux is a subset of free software I think that it is valid. But I will not say and didn't mean to imply that Linux is about the FSF. But I repeat my question: What is Linux about? Linux is a kernal, it can't be about anything. So your fallacy is in implying that it could.
I wouldn't say that. The BSD system is hardly viable for much more than serving by itself AFAIK. One of the FSF's most significant contributions was probably the GPL. Not to mention that gcc and bash is helpful for BSD as well.
-----
-----
"A man is judged by his every word." -RW Emerson
"They misunderestimated me." -GW Bush
I'll answer a few of the questions raised by various posts on this discussion. (I subscribe to the debian-hurd, help-hurd and bug-hurd mailing lists, and I've tried the Hurd on several occasions, so I more or less know what I'm talking about.)
Of course, the TCP stack crashed minutes after the site being slashdotted. This isn't really an issue: Hurd is still highly experimental, and its TCP stack (which is merely a copy of the routines from Linux - but done in some haste, I think) is mostly used to make it possible to use the box remotely (the Mach console is a pain for one thing, and X requires some patches to work on Hurd). The interesting thing, however, is that whereas the translator handling the TCP stack crashed (the ``pfinet'' translator), the system didn't. That is, in fact, the whole point about the microkernel architecture.
The last distribution of the complete GNU system was 0.2 and it is now completely obsolete. The next distribution, Debian GNU/Hurd 0.3 potato, should come out together with the corresponding GNU/Linux distribution, and share some packages with it (the non-binary packages; binary compatibility between Hurd and Linux is a goal for the future and shouldn't be too hard to achieve, but it's not there yet).
The system now works quite well, and is able to run nearly everything, but it's still far from stable, and miles from being optimized. Filesystem demons are the most important thing to finish, and they are now almost completely stable. More advanced translators like the nfs clients or the ftpfs (allows you to mount ftp directories) are there more to show the power of the translator paradigm than as actual working systems, and they're quite unstable. But, once again, the whole point is that if a filesystem (other than your root filesystem) crashes, the system will typically continue to function correctly anyway.
The Hurd shares the same libc with Linux, so porting from Linux to Hurd is typically trivial. The major source or problems is that some programs make wrong assumptions about system limits, that are not true on the Hurd. For example OPEN_MAX is 256 on Linux, and is 2So the Hurd certainly won't be ready before a couple more years. But you shouldn't conclude that it never will ``catch up'' with Linux, either. For one thing, most changes made to the hardware drivers of Linux are incorporated verbatim in the GNU-Mach microkernel, so the Hurd team doesn't have to worry (excessively) about all that. Adding filesystems to the Hurd is much easier than on Linux, and debugging them even more so, so there it's also not too much of a worry that the Hurd development team is so small. The problem of the TCP stack remains, and while it should be possible to take some parts from Linux, it will probably be a long time before the Hurd has the same networking capabilities as Linux...
By posting this, I shall undoubtedly be subjected to the wrath of the many vocal zealots who make up a majority of the HURD community
I've never been a zealot for anything, but I understand it's a requirement to being a Real Geek (tm). Where do I sign up to be a HURD zealot? I know next to nothing about HURD, therefore I have all the qualifications!
Communication is only possible between equals
I can just imagine him surfing the net, reading Slashdot.. He sees a story about him appear at the top of the main page. He has two seconds to say "Oh NO!".
Suddenly, his net connection is hosed for the next week.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
So, the FSF is about all open source software (which you equate to free software)? Is that really true?
:)
Yes. Absolutely. Freedom to users is the entire reason for the FSF of being.
There's a lot of free software out there that the FSF doesn't seem to care to have anything to do with. Certainly there's a lot of free software that would very strongly prefer that the FSF have nothing to do with them.
You are confusing software with developers. The FSF's goal is for their to be more free software and more users of free software. Strategicly, projects that encourage less software or more users of propietary software is not in free software's best interest and the FSF is right for encouraging otherwise.
BTW: Software doesn't prefer anything
Get it mentioned on slashdot.
Course, that stress-tests your ISP as well. May not be too usefull.
Everyone seems to be ticked that this server is going slow... I think that's fair. It's still in beta (I'm pretty sure), and even it weren't, it would be a very low version, somewhere around 1.0. Show me a box running linux kernel 1.0 that can withstand the slashdot effect. Hmpf. Aaron
That means BSD is good at being useful. GNU/Linux is good at giving users freedom.
If BSD had all the hype right now instead of GNU/Linux, wouldn't you think that Corel would be propietizing the entire operating system right now? Making incompatible changes for their software to work on it but no other version of BSD to give them a competitive advantage.
If I at some future point and time use a BSD-derived system, I have no guarentee that I will have source code, freedom to modify, or freedom to redistribute. With GNU and Linux, I have that freedom.
Copycenter is an interesting concept. Could be used for textbook examples. BTW, what is the difference between the BSD license and public domain?
The HURD is a kernel, much like the Linux Kernel.
When the GNU project was started, it was intended that HURD be the kernel used with the GNU utils to form a UNIX-like operating system.
However, they left HURD to last (seemingly) and before they could get it finished enough to be useable, the Linux Kernel arrived and was combined with the GNU utils to form "Linux" as we know it today.
Emacs development is very closed compared to e.g. the Linux kernel. The pre-tester lists are invitation only, and doesn't contain discussion. Test releases are rare, and placed in execute-only directories on secret ftp sites. There are, to my knowledge, no real developer lists, instead RMS send private mail to people whose help or input he want on particular issues. There are no access to the development code outside an even smaller group than the pre-testers.
Contrast this with XEmacs development, where the development discussion is public, there are frequent development releases, and anonymous CVS access to the latest sources.
ESR has been involved with Emacs development, and his characterization is quite on the mark. The Emacs distribution itself is a one man project, however, a community (or bazaar) exsists around the various Emacs Lisp packages.
These daemons do all work, and make the system look like a POSIXesque system. The daemons are (theoretically) easier to mix and match then a big monolithic kernel's functions. They also could potentially perform better in an SMP environment (since there's lots of seperate processes).
The other big thing in the HURD is file translators -- these are programs that are run when a file is opened, read, written to, whatever. So, for instance, you could have a file translator that creates virtual directories or makes a transparent ftp connection (so that, for instance, the file /ftp/ftp.cdrom.com/pub/README would transparently retrieve a file).
You can read much more at the HURD's website.
Larry Wall created patch as free software. After he lost interest in it, the FSF took over maintenance.
Some persons are bashing Hurd for not standing up to being Slashdotted.
I'd like to remind everyone that resisting being Slashdotted does not require a good processor or a good operating system or a lot of memory (that is, unless you are building pages dynamically in a wrong (eg. cgi) way), just a good network connection.
This box could run any operating system on a fast processor with a lot of memory and the results would be the same if it had the same bandwitdh.
So don't bash Hurd merely because this box was Slashdotted.
For those who don't know, Hurd is GNU's kernel. I won't tell you here all the reasons why you should be interested on it, though.
Alejo
According to Thomas Bushnell, BSG, the primary architect of the Hurd, ```Hurd' stands for `Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons'. And, then, `Hird' stands for `Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth'. We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.''
It is still free and now also protected by the GPL.
If you have a bit of time left, read Open Sources. It contains (among others) an interesting article by Richard Stallman and lists up the controversy around monolithic/micro kernels back in the days when Linux was still a very small project. A well-known computer science professor tried to convince everybody else that 'Linux is obsolete' (appendix A).
It's my understanding that while the Hurd is aiming for Posix compatibility, and going to use glibc as the standard library, they're going to be much more modular and abstracted (read: cool but possibly slow) under the hood.
.signature be randomly generated by a program without using ugly named pipe hacks, you could "cd file.tar.gz" without ugly virtual filesystem libraries, you could implement albods more easily... I can't imagine all the possibilities, but it's fun to try.
The neatest things I've heard of:
The whole system is basically cooperating servers running atop the GNU Mach microkernel:
the idea that every user can build up his own system on top. So, if you want to operate, start compatible servers. It's after all your decision, much like it is your personal decision if you use one desktop system (like Gnome) or Xlib, Athena etc programs together. Latter don't interoperate well (drag n drop etc). As they run in user space, you can tweak the system to your liking, even as a user.
But there are still some servers that are the base of the Hurd system. Those are the auth, proc, init and password server at least. You don't need to register your process with the proc server (and it won't show up in the output of "ps" if you don't do so), but that the only thing that will give you access to the features of the proc server. Same with auth. If you don use auth, your tasks will have little to none privilegdes.
Better yet, filesystem support comes from servers, which I believe means that users can have files or filesystems (limited to user permissions) that live off their own servers. Every mounted filesystem is just another new filesystem server added to the pool. No need to make smbmount suid root or put every smb share with the user option into fstab, for instance; any user process would be able to mount arbitrary smb shares in their own directories and make them viewable without being able to circument security. Cooler yet, in theory you could make
Superficially you'd think there's an element of jealousy there because Stallman almost wrote an OS then someone else got most of the limelight by writing the kernel... but that just doesn't feel like the case.
There's appropriate mailing lists you can hunt down for deep info, but you can follow the Cliff's Notes of the Debian Hurd work at the debian-hurd Kernel Cousin page.
Ouch, the guy is on @Home, where every customer's gateway is on the same /24 subnet with a host number of 1. So, his IP is 24.113.102.239, and his gateway is 24.113.102.1. It is a valid IP, and it isn't returning pings -- there went the entire subnet of @Home customers. :-/
:)
So, ironically, while most of the discussion here regards the OS on hurd.zugzug.com, a more apt topic would be the OS on the gateway.
Seriously though - I love that poem.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Before there was Linux, there was GNU. What is GNU? GNU's not Unix. What is Unix? A castrated Multics. What is multics? An operating system. So GNU's not a castrated operating system.
:).
Wait. That's not right. No, it is right, but it isn't what you're looking for, right? Right.
GNU was intended to be a castrated operating system, er, I mean operating system. The difference is that GNU was intended to be free to distribute and modify. When Richard Stallman set about to write the GNU system in 1984, he quickly saw that he couldn't get anywhere without a compiler.
Or tools.
Or libraries.
So the GNU project carried on for 7 years writing compilers, tools, and libraries, always psyching themselves up for writing the key part of the OS - the kernel. But Linus beat them to it. Linux, released under the same "GPL" liscense of the GNU System, starting getting acceptance amoung the so-called open source community (except it wasn't so-called at that time. It started being so-called in 1998. Back then it was so-called something else.).
But the GNU people never lost their dream of writing not-a-castrated-kernel for their system. And that's what HURD is. I mean HIRD. I mean... well, I know I don't mean herd.
The HURD kernel, technically, has one big advantage over the Linux kernel - it is microkernel-based.
As Linus continually points out, anything you can do to make a microkernel OS fast, you can do to a monolithic kernel (like Linux). All this is true - and the monolithic kernel wins because of lower overhead. That's why Linux continually beats out high-end rockin' Solaris on single-processor machines.
However, the overhead due to microkernels are only constant factors. Kinda like in the old days when you could write in assembler and beat the pants off of any compiler by a constant factor (depending on how good you were, and how bad the compiler was, that constant could be pretty high). But the problem with giving up a high-level language for assembly is the same problem with giving up microkernels for monolithic kernels - giving up the abstraction makes programming harder. (This might be kind of prophetic: these days compilers will beat assembly programmers almost every time)
Since programming is already so hard (grin), the development of new abstractions has been one of the key factors behind the advancement of computer science. All abstractions (think: high-level languages, structured programming, object-oriented programming, pure-OO programming, lambda-calculus programming) increasingly make programming easier at the expense of decreasing speed.
*But* Linux still has many more years of development behind it than HURD. Or HIRD. But not herds (some of them have been around for millenia... unfortunate about the Buffalo, though). And Linux still has more coders. So Linux will likely stay ahead of HURD for a while.... (at least until they have a stable release
How does this concern you? To finish this off, I must say that unless you happen to have a 16-processor box lying around, all this won't help. Linux still rules the day on single processor machines, and probably won't be over taken.
Since you probably don't have a massive SMP machine, everything I've written was a complete waste of time. So there.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I was amused that a Hurd system (the first public webserver?) got slashdotted as well, but when I couldn't connect to it I noticed something even funnier: the connection is an @Home Cable Modem!! Ah, to slashdot an experimental OS connected via a cable modem, thats just mean. :) I wonder what @Home thinks about this one..
I hope you gave them a little heads-up before putting this up.
Something like "It's nice you've got this experimental new server thingy going, 'cause in ten minutes we're going to bury you."
Or just "Hi, we run Slashdot. Brace yourselves."
--
Mike Hoye
This is precisely the power of open-source. Closed-source software generally has little legacy; when the company that produced it goes under, or merely cancels the product, it dies. On the other hand, open-source software doesn't get buried and forgotten based on the failure of other business efforts or the whim of some project manager. Tools, libraries, even individual routines, get stripped out, cleaned off, and reused.
HURD may or may not be successful. But one interesting thing about its architecture is that it will be much easier to "strip for parts" than the Linux kernel. So after both Linux and HURD are long gone, the latter may wind up with the most impact even if it doesn't achieve Linux's popularity.
Except that @Home doesn't use very dynamic addresses too often.
I'm on @Home, and in the 8 months I've been with them, my IP has changed only once.
It's against their TOS to have a server up (but everyone does, and they usually let it slide except when it's hurting performance badly). I think this case would qualify as such. Will he get a warning, or cut off for good, I wonder?
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
I've always envied the "old-timers" who brag about running Linux since 1991. You know -- the people who wax nostalgic about downloading and compiling the 0.9 kernel.
Now, thanks to Hurd, I have a chance to get in on the ground floor. Maybe in 5 years, you'll read a post from me griping about the glibc9 to glibc10 conversion.
Thanks, guys!
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I am having a difficult time believing that Hurd will ever amount to anything. If it is ever to gain a place as a widly used OS, it will have to have major advantages over linux. Linux is several years ahead of Hurd in both stability and features, and i see little reason to believe that this won't contiune. A new OS will only find success if it fills a void, and i see no void for it. Windows filled a void for a GUI for cheap hardware, BSD filled a void for an open sourced OS, and Linux filled one for an open source operating system. If Hurd has something that will make it much better than Linux, then it has a chance, but if not there will be no compelling reason to switch, and it will never be of any real use. I think that RMS and the rest of the FSF should put their egos aside and work on the development of the kernel that is stable and functional. If there is some major advantage to using hurd, please enlighten me.
For those of you not familiar with the boyfriend of the writer of "Frankenstein", Mr. Percy Bysse Shelley (sp?) wrote a poem about the futility of all temporal efforts at earthly permanence in his poem "Ozmandias", where the narrator finds the base of an immense statue with an inscription of "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair", yet the only thing to be seen are the endless tracks of sand.
Even though one day GNU/Linux will be as extinct as Minoan Linear A (a language never yet successfully translated in modern times), it was here and it has made and will continue to make (for at least the near future) the world a better place than "Microzmandias" ever did.
May the penguin continue to evolve and promulgate worthy successors!
HURD is older then linux
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In FreeBSD, you can have a process back a filesystem. It is called Portal FS. It is really cool.
FreeBSD has alot of cool filesystems, check them all out. Union FS rocks.
Given that the Solaris/SunOS 5.x kernel is a monolithic kernel (with loadable modules, but Linux has those as well), not a microkernel plus stuff atop it, how can this be "why Linux continually beats out ... Solaris on single-processor machines"?
I was wondering recently if there are any HURD servers out there connected to the net doing real production work - serving web pages, an FTP site, a news or mail server, CVS serving, or anything else. Does anyone know of one? Is anyone willing to subject theirs to the /. effect? The original release of the HURD was a long time ago - 0.2 was released in June of 1997. I would expect that by now there would be a usable production system. I don't intend this as a slam against GNU/FSF/Stallman or the HURD developers. I am just wondering how much momentum the HURD has, and whether people are using it.
Cheers
Eric Geyer
Why not just mrtg your ethernet adapters. Install UCD-SNMP, install mrtg, query mrtg, get statistics. Here is my traffic statistics page for my external ethernet adapter which is connected to a cable modem. I have friends doing the same on rogers.
:-).
Now that you mention it, though, I do wonder if my terayon modem has SNMP MIB's that would allow my provider to measure traffic..
Would the microkernel architecture of HURD make it possible to do a running-upgrade of (most of) the kernel? It would at least seem to be possible, if the modules are designed with this in mind.
Any thoughts?
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.