
Hurd Progresses - Debian GNU/Hurd by end of 2012? - b2spirit
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Hurd-Progresses-Debian-GNU-Hurd-by-end-of-2012-1279253.html
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onan_barbarian
Serious question: what's this for? It doesn't seem to be an interesting
research project, and shows no sign of being useful in a pragmatic sense.

Surely a clean-sheet design started _now_ would be more interesting and
perhaps even useful than a 21-year-old microkernel. Think about all the
changes in architecture, networks, storage, etc.

We're in a world with consumer processors with 4-8 cores and hardware
multithreading, GPUs that rival or exceed (in certain domains) the processing
grunt of the CPUs, network cards that can talk to L2 cache, SSDs, etc.

Surely enough has changed that a clean-sheet design could be a lot more
exciting - and even more practical - than trying to finish a design that
hasn't succeeded for 2 decades. A clean-sheet design would at least be
interesting - we already know you can build a workable system on top of a
microkernel.

This isn't a claim to know what a clean sheet design would look like; I
haven't really looked seriously at OS research in 15 years. I just strongly
suspect you might do radically different, interesting designs in 2011 vs 1990.

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rkwz
_> Surely a clean-sheet design started _now_ would be more interesting and
perhaps even useful than a 21-year-old microkernel._

Just curious, are there any such OS in development?

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p9idf
Sape Mullender and Noah Evans from Bell Labs announced last year that they are
working on a system called Osprey. There's video of the talk floating around
somewhere.

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tzs
I've occasionally thought it would be an interesting project to try to
organize some kind of "Let's finish Hurd for them" meet up, maybe in
conjunction with some major conference that a lot of Linux kernel hackers
attend.

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sheffield
Let's call it the Gathering of the _New Herd_!

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tzs
I was thinking "Hacking Hurd for GNUmanity" as a play on "Habitat for
Humanity".

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tomjen3
That would be nice, but honestly I doubt it since they have been trying to
release it for longer than I have been alive.

Anyway the Linux kernel is good enough, so the effort seems wasted.

~~~
sheffield
Rivalry is always good, it's essential for evolution.

~~~
danieldk
Let's see, we have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. Two of them have
even been integrated in current GNU systems (Debian/FreeBSD and Nexenta). How
does yet another kernel help?

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p9idf
Hurd isn't stuck in the seventies and aims to do more than re-implement a
40-year-old design.

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onan_barbarian
The irony of this remark is that while it is literally correct, the truth of
the matter is that Hurd is stuck in the early 90s and aims to re-implement a
20-year-old design.

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eftpotrm
... while wrapping it to make it look like an early 1970s design.

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apgwoz
I played seriously with Hurd in the early 2000s, and remember really loving
many of its ideas. The user space file systems (which Fuse does for other
OSes) were quite cool. I can't imagine that much of the good stuff Hurd
promised hasn't already been adopted by others.

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ittan
It would be nice if everyone take some time off linux to help with Hurd.
Participation and write 1 line of code can go a long way in helping them along
:). I really want to see Hurd completed.

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pwaring
It might be nice, but from a purely selfish point of view I'd rather people
(not just coders) spent time improving Linux (which is already in widespread
use) than tinkering with Hurd.

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antoarts
How well does Hurd compare to Linux?

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zarathustra3m
Not well. It has only a better design (in theory!) and is GNU (so politically
speaking is more Free Software than Linux...).

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sek
Is Hurd licensed under GPLv3? There is a reason why Linux isn't.

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smashing
I think Debian already works with HURD using Mach 4 as long as the core
libraries include extra header information(1). I believe this process is
called "porting"(2) in Debian lingo but involves the whole distribution, i.e.
just core libraries but driver frameworks as well. When I think of porting, I
think of rewriting in another language. This is a patching job to me, massive
as it may be, but whatever.

My information only comes from my research made the better part of a decade
ago(3) when they were seriously looking to port the microkernel to L4 from
Mach 4(4), but sadly it appears that work was abandoned around 2006 [Dunno,
why? It might be started again]. I suspect the low level switch had a lot to
do with interest in a better kernel in OS X than what Darwin(5), XNU(6) on the
Mac, could provide(7). In the Panther, pre-Leopard days there was a lot of
interest in this(8) kind of project: large-scale microkernels(9).

I don't know if this effort will include the port from L4(10) with the Mach
abstraction API to "save" the prior work in getting Mach to work with standard
Debian without the extra header requirements.

Anyway, I'm going to get some coffee and lunch. If anyone wants to fund an
idea like this, I would like to any of the number of amazing things that they
are doing with non-tricyclic antidepressants these days. Just look at the good
it did for Tony Soprano.

(1) <http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install>

(2)
[http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/porting/guidelines.htm...](http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/porting/guidelines.html)

(3) <http://www.shakthimaan.com/installs/debian-t41.html> [Not me]

(4) <http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/mach.html>

(5) <http://darwinbuild.macosforge.org/>

(6)
[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/About/About.html)

(7) I don't have any insider information. I'm just a developer.

(8) Mac OSX Panther for Unix Geeks, Brian Jepson, ISBN-13: 978-0596006075,
Chapter 7

(9) <http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/darbat/>

(10) [http://kilobug.free.fr/hurd/pres-
en/abstract/html/abstract.h...](http://kilobug.free.fr/hurd/pres-
en/abstract/html/abstract.html)

