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Hurd's current status should be considered in the context of how the GNU project is run. In the early days GNU had some paid developers, but now their projects
by avar 16y ago
Hurd's current status should be considered in the context of how the GNU project is run. In the early days GNU had some paid developers, but now their projects are run purely on a volunteer basis. Or in the case projects like GCC, developers that are paid by companies to work on GNU projects.
Hurd is late because there isn't any need for it anymore, we now have plenty of free kernels. And GNU isn't sponsoring it because of that, just like it isn't sponsoring a GNU MTA.
But work continues because a few people are still interested. There's a lot of neat ideas in Hurd. You get a lot of nice things once you move most of the kernel to user-space.
The best example of this is custom user-mounted filesystems (translators). You can e.g. mount a remote FTP site on Hurd in ~/ftp without being a superuser, this is something that GNOME and KDE implement on their own because users can't do it on other systems without special permissions.
Linux has been accumulating a lot of microkernel-like features over the years. E.g. dynamic loading of device drivers, FUSE etc. In time it'll probably usurp every useful Hurd feature worth having.
- rbanffy 16y agoRichard Gabriel was right. Unix is good enough and few people care whether HURD has some nicer features that can be implemented in the wrong layers through piles of clever hacks.
- avar 16y agoIndeed. Worse is better, and I use Linux and not Hurd because it does what I need even if it doesn't look shiny on paper. I'm not convinced that Hurd's translator idea is a hack, or that it's doing it in the wrong layer. That every program that presents FTP on my system (GNOME, KDE, lftp, Emacs/TRAMP) has to implement its own VFS is a hack, so is having to use iptables or another forwarder if I want to run a non-root daemon on port <1024. And that I have to recompile and reboot if I want to enable some minor feature in the kernel. EDIT: The last two paragraphs are redundant because I misread rbanffy's reply, and I oddly can't reply to his new one so I'm putting this here.
- rbanffy 16y agoNo. HURD's translators are the right idea. The hack is reimplementing VFSs at the GUI level.
- joe_the_user 16y agoCertainly the existence of the KDE-specific virtual file system is a terrible thing...
- rbanffy 16y agoI really saddens me Plan/9 went nowhere (parts of it went everywhere ;-) ) I am uncomfortable having what amount to be sci-fi versions of Unix and VMS to chose from. What would be a cutting-edge, legacy-free OS these days?
- eru 16y agoExokernels: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html Though sadly this page is from 1998. But there are some people who are still working on Exokernels. You can meet them here at HN.
- eru 16y agoI am quite involved with virtualization. The interesting thing is, that some people are now running their software on the virtualized bare metal--i.e. using the hypervisor but without an operating system. This is essentially treating the hypervisor as an exokernel operating system. And it seems to become more common. Perhaps we are really coming to exokernels in a very roundabout way.
- rortian 16y agoBut not at all as a general computing environment. It makes sense once you have your application finished that you could move it to a kernel that has just what you need. However, it makes no sense when you start development to try to guess what calls you might end up using.