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Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 Released
- jasonvorhe 7y agoI'm curious, but why are people still spending time and resources on Hurd? Is it curiosity or is there some use case for Hurd that I'm not aware of? Thanks.
- knocte 7y agoYou don't know the fundamental difference between Hurd and Linux, do you?
- NilsIRL 7y agoAre you referring to the micro-kernel part?
- knocte 7y agoYes
- Ylodi 7y agoHurd is like Mazda Wankel engine. :-)
- sverige 7y agoExcept Mazda actually sold millions of cars that ran down the road with the Wankel engine.
- m463 7y agoThe wankel was actually like Hurd at one point, everybody thought it would be the next big thing and many car manufacturers had wankel engines. Mazda stuck it out and funded it into production.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post dismissive comments like this. If you know more, share what you know so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that or don't have time, that's fine, but then please just don't post anything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anthony_doan 7y agoI can't speak for the developer of Hurd. But I think it's fun and something different. It's one of the few OS up there that seems to be able to take advantage of multicores. Other such as barrelfish and dragonflyBSD.
- murderfs 7y ago??? Hurd doesn't even support SMP yet.
- anthony_doan 7y agoThat's correct Hurd doesn't support SMP yet [1]. In theory it should and I'm waiting for that. Kind of like how I waited for HAMMER2. 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/smp.html https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/smp.html
- pjmlp 7y agoBecause we already have enough UNIX clones and there are people that care about bringing forward the computing stack with modern concepts.
- cultofmetatron 7y agopersonally, I think people who are interested in hurd should take a look at redox. Its a new microkernel with similar design goals that uses rust as its implementation language.
- CameronNemo 7y agoThe L4 ecosystem is much more mature. There are formally proven variants like seL4, and more widely used variants like wrmOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family I am excited to see how redox evolves, but unless they start writing, virtualizing, or porting drivers it is not much more than an experiment in how well Rust can handle OS programming.
- nameismypw 7y agoHurd is part of the GNU system; it's the intended kernel for the GNU userspace. Linux has been used as an intermediary because Hurd isn't ready for widespread use. But the idea has always been that Hurd would replace Linux and create a GNU system that is entirely under the FSF. Beyond the philosophical differences, another difference is that Hurd is a microkernel and Linux is monolithic. Hurd can be considered a research project for exploring microkernels. The most well-developed microkernels are not open source or free.
- jcranmer 7y ago> But the idea has always been that Hurd would replace Linux and create a GNU system that is entirely under the FSF. I don't think that's the case. The FSF has long been satisfied that Linux meets its goals for an OS kernel, and the Hurd project has changed somewhat from "this will be the final piece of the GNU operating system" to "this is something we're working on to explore microkernel design." I think its developers have given up on it ever replacing Linux, as it's very behind in hardware support, and the gap is only ever growing rather than shrinking. For example, it doesn't support multicore or 64-bit userland (in a time when projects are pulling 32-bit userland support!).
- Thev00d00 7y ago> Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with about 80% of the Debian archive, and more to come! Does Hurd still not support amd64?!
- lol768 7y agoFrom https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/64-bit.html https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/64-bit.html > There are currently no plan for 64-bit userland, but there are plans for 64-bit kernelland with 32-bit userland, which will notably permit to efficiently make use of more than 2 GiB memory and provide 4 GiB userland addressing space. Work on this is currently in the master-x86_64 and port-amd64 branches for GNU Mach. > That being said, you can always run a 32-bit version on a 64-bit machine, it just works, processes are just limited to a couple GiB available memory.
- StudentStuff 7y agoDebian x32 has a pretty similar concept wrt more efficient memory usage: https://wiki.debian.org/X32Port https://wiki.debian.org/X32Port
- chrisseaton 7y agoYou can also store pointers for more than 4 GB in a 32 bit address by compressing them.
- comradesmith 7y agoBut you are still using 32 bit registers so your load and save instructions can't really make use of compressed addresses
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 7y ago
- blodovnik 7y agoWhat does Hurd uniquely solve?
- unixhero 7y agoWell apart from actually building and researching how to build an OS. This stems from a very very deep seated itch. The answer is "because we can". It's volunteer engineering; because they can! Also it is not possible to know how the fruits of innovation might materialise. There might be achievments coming from this in a serendipitous way. The Hurd is a process.
- ianai 7y agoAfter the news about pip being maintained by 5 people, I wonder how many are working on hurd. (As a grown adult, I also envy and more than a little humbled by their ability to devote time to it.)
- lostmsu 7y agoSounds more like a realization, than news. It is very similar in most of open source.
- Fnoord 7y agoWhich microkernel based OSes are ccurrently deployed? Which of these are open source?
- loeg 7y agoFuschia, for example; there are also various L4-based systems, some of which are open source.
- kryptiskt 7y agoQNX is widespread in embedded systems, it's sadly closed source (it's a magnificent OS). L4 is a family of operating systems, sharing an API, not code. The ancestor was built to prove that microkernels could be fast. SeL4 is a formally proved variant. They are open source. They are also used in embedded systems, like baseband processors. Minix 3 is an academic project by Andrew Tanenbaum. A few eyebrows were raised when it turned out that it is present in all new Intel chipsets.
- jbverschoor 7y agoOh wow, I didn't realize hurd was still alive, and even 80% of the packages are working! Impressive
- robotbikes 7y agoI think that it is exciting that people are still working on Hurd and there is a new release synced with Buster. I think there is latent potential in microkernels and that we may actually be at in position to exploit some of the benefits such as heightened security and stability. While at the same time the performance cost of context switching could be reduced due to the higher number of cores on modern chips (especially compared to the hardware available in the 90s). One of the biggest adoption challenge any new operating presents is hardware compatibility and well a reason to try it. 80% software compatibility with Debian is a big accomplishment, so this is probably worth spinning up a virtual machine to play around with.
- harry8 7y agoWell I've been hearing about those benefits for at least 20 years. None yet actually sighted in the wild. Any attempted explanations from the microkernel religious zealots has been thoroughly unconvincing (because mach is slow, so?). Maybe you're right, I'd love to see it if you are. But while prior performance is no guarantee of the future, as they say in the funds management adverts, a pattern of repeated failure is something maybe not to completely ignore. Is there a reason for it that is being overlooked or glossed over. (In mutual funds it was and is M.E.R.) Stallman talks about hurd being really hard to debug, is that a thing? Or is there some kind of combinational explosion using multiple servers a message passing that isn't there with a monothlithic kernel? Something else entirely? Anyway I'll go back to the american monolithic kernel conspiracy to destroy OS research and keep the Europeans out and ask the brothers if they can think of anything. (That's a joke, right? Yet I've heard it said in the absence of irony...)
- pjmlp 7y agoMaybe you should take your eyes out of the UNIX clone desktop and look into OSes powering life critical embedded deployments.
- harry8 7y agoFollowed all your links and found precisely nothing. So many microkernel zealots, down vote storm ahoy. Must be annoying for those involved who are serious engineers and researchers.
- stdcall83 7y agolet's write the same line twice in the change log so it will look like we put more work...
- wtetzner 7y agoOr, you know, it could have been a mistake.
- joelthelion 7y agoHow well does it work? Can you run Gnome, for instance?
- TallGuyShort 7y agoDoes the Hurd team go around lecturing people who call it "Hurd" about how it's actually "GNU"/Hurd, how Hurd is the kernel and that's only one part, or is that only when the kernel wasn't their idea?
- 153791098c 7y agoHurd is a GNU project so it doesn't even really need a second mention, it only needs that mention because there is a competing kernel (Linux) that is used with the system. Otherwise it's just known as the GNU system. The kernel is pretty irrelevant for most users, we don't call it Android/Linux or Windows/NT for a reason. A kernel is not an operating system. Calling the whole OS Linux is both inaccurate and does not introduce anyone to the whole reason why the GNU project was started, which is having the freedom to really own and control your computer. Linus Torvalds doesn't give a shit about that and is happy with chromebooks as long as they use his kernel. Freedom is irrelevant to him and most of the "open-source" community. That should be reason enough to not call the entire system Linux.
- farisjarrah 7y agoYou're argument holds water, but the problem is when we start getting into OS's that actually don't ship any of the GNU userland. The classic example is Alpine Linux. Do we call that BusyBox/Linux? WSL 1 was a super weird anti-example where Microsoft skipped out on the Linux and shipped GNU stuff and still called it Linux. I think the colloquial naming convention became something like Kleenex or Google where we default to blowing our nose with (generic usage, not brand usage) "kleenex" with off-brand tissues or had our parents (generic usage, not brand usage) "google" something on Bing (as thats the default search engine of Windows).
- gsam 7y agoDepends on what you mean by Linux. The ABI Microsoft were attempting to emulate was absolutely Linux. (This API business is exactly the issue with Oracle vs Google over Java).
- 7y ago
- equalunique 7y agoI own a 32-bit machine specifically for trying out GNU/Hurd, just for fun. Glad to have an excuse for dusting it off once again.
- snvzz 7y agoStill stuck using Mach (1st gen microkernel). Design failures highlighted in the Hurd critique paper still not addressed. I'd look elsewhere, such as Genode with seL4, or Minix3.
- amaccuish 7y agoCan someone with more knowledge answer, is it possible to have one core in kernel mode and another core in user mode? If yes, is it quicker to message between cores or to context switch?
- xmichael999 7y agoI've been reading about hurd for so long, today is the day I try it in Virtualbox! Cool stuff, good work people!
- _448 7y ago..and the Symbian guys will be thinking where did they go wrong? :)
- poelzi 7y agoMaybe if Hurd decide to rewrite their kernel in rust I would give a s@#!, but since it's still a none usable kernel after decades of debugging and development, maybe it's ripe for /dev/null ?