7 ms·

A Debian GNU/Hurd snapshot

69 points by sciurus 13y ago

mindstab 13y ago
As time goes on GNU HURD becomes sadder and sadder :/ They can't even seem to be consistently settled on their basics like what micro kernel they are using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurd#Other_microkernels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurd#Other_microkernels In the 2000s they experimented with 3 other micro kernels, all of which went "no where". Over half a decade spending their limited dev resources on work that ultimately went no where since they are still apparently using Mach. and now (from the article): - GNU/Hurd 2013 is available for the 32-bit x86 architecture only - Hurd can currently only make use of one CPU (or CPU core). That is to say, it will still run on multi-core and SMP machines, but only utilizing a single processor. - Hurd generally uses device drivers ported from Linux 2.0 ... So the latest and greatest shiny hardware might cause trouble. Once upon a time if you could get it to run on your hardware it was at least vaguely competitive, but now the thought of putting it on my 64bit quad core laptop... well... what a waste. And instead of trying to even keep up, they are still trying to pick the right micro kernel... "In years past, Richard Stallman was quoted as saying that Linux was a good option to use while the Hurd was still incomplete"
- jared314 13y ago
  I wonder what could be done to actually turn the project around. There are articles on HN almost everyday about small project management this and agile that. What might actually help this project?
  - michaelhoffman 13y ago
    The first thing they would need is a compelling reason for people to spend their time on the project.
- greenlakejake 13y ago
  "In years past, Richard Stallman was quoted as saying that Linux was a good option to use while the Hurd was still incomplete" Linux will remain a good option for a long time.
- p9idf 13y ago
  The Hurd authors might find your part-time projects just as sad and pathetic as you find theirs. There's not much I can say beyond that, since you've based your judgement on vague and wishy-washy concepts like going somewhere, being "vaguely competitive", and keeping up. It's no business of yours to criticize the direction of a project you have no involvement or stake in, especially when you can't articulate what direction you'd prefer.
  - mindstab 13y ago
    The problem is HURD isn't positioned as a part time product, it's positioned as a replacement to Linux, which is inferior technically, just has more hands on deck right now. I'm not so scornful of the many many many other OS projects out there because they don't generally act like they are better than all that exists and going to naturally supplant it if they can just find the right microkernel... Also very few "side projectS" have been going on for like 25 years... So again my personal side projects are hard to compare to an organization's quarter century effort. Direction I'd prefer? Working on modern hardware and taking full advantage of it! Was that not clear? That's the whole point. They spend all their time on on designing and redesigning archetecture and their software is now getting less relevant on real hardware. Mostly only makes sense now to run as a VM. Which is probably not what they want for the OS that is supposed to replace Linux....
  - greenlakejake 13y ago
    My sad and pathetic part-time projects don't drag on for 25 years. :)
m0th87 13y ago
Hurd is one of those pieces of tech that just makes me sad. Performance implications aside, micro-kernels feel so much more "right". It feels like proper software engineering techniques applied to the kernel-level. How cool would it be to be able to, e.g. replace the default scheduler with something that satisfies your niche requirements? But in Hurd's quarter century of life, it's gone nowhere, while Linux, Windows and OS X have zipped by. It feels like nothing short of an apocalypse will bring the micro-kernel back. I think the only major one in the wild in QNX (Blackberry OS), and that's waning. OS X / NT are no longer microkernels. "Worse is better" still rings true, in more ways than one.
- protomyth 13y ago
  Components were very successful with Visual Basic, but (despite the C# description[1]) haven't really been front and center in languages and operating systems. I honestly think it is because we don't have something at the bottom that was built components first. Decoupling designs is hard, and we get systems of objects and not components. 1) 2nd paragraph of introduction http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=7029 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id...
- strictfp 13y ago
  Remember that microkernels aren't just trying to achieve modularity - they also take a stab at robustness by failure recovery. This is IMO doomed to fail - you are much better off trying to achieve robustness by correctness. Monolithic kernels focus more on correctness and therefore progress much faster.
  - rookieMP 13y ago
    MINIX seems to be working pretty well these days.
  - cwzwarich 13y ago
    Most of the kernels that try very hard to achieve correctness (in the embedded / real-time space that would be used in military or aerospace applications) are microkernels. Microkernels have a smaller number of primitives that are more orthogonal, so they are easier to implement correctly and audit them, and you get some amount of preemptibility for free. Also, as far as I know, the only kernel that has been proven correct with a mechanically verifiable proof is an L4 variant.
rookieMP 13y ago
A lot of people will point and laugh at HURD, calling it a really sad project or whatever. Why? Considering the small number of developers, it has come along spectacularly. Over time, HURD has been improving at a decently consistent rate. I remember a time when it was nearly impossible to get it running even on QEMU. God damn people, sure it's missing features; but those features don't inhibit it running. I, for one, am glad that they decided to get it stable before they get it fast. I will always wait for the day I can say my computer runs GNU. Nothing else, just GNU.
- papsosouid 13y ago
  Why? Because in the time HURD has sat around trying to figure out whose code to use and call HURD, other people have actually written useful kernels. Minix for example.
  - rookieMP 13y ago
    Minix was first released in 87, three years before development on HURD even began. Yeah, okay, that was just nitpicking. But they're not doing that anymore, so why bother complaining about it anymore? Sure, it's not up to snuff yet, but perhaps it will be decently soon. Development on HURD has really surged in the past year or two, I'd like to say.
    - papsosouid 13y ago
      >Minix was first released in 87, three years before development on HURD even began. Minix wasn't an attempt at a production kernel in 1987. Minix 1 and Minix 2 were purely for teaching. Minix 3 was a completely new project, and wasn't started until 2005. >but perhaps it will be decently soon The history of the project and its current state suggest that is unlikely. >Development on HURD has really surged in the past year or two, I'd like to say. You might very well like to say that, but that doesn't mean it is true. There are no competent systems programmers working for/with GNU, it is highly unlikely that the random assortment of people chosen for their politics rather than their skillset will be able to turn the longest festering mess of code ever into a production ready kernel.
lelf 13y ago
I tried it long time ago. And it's something magical about the fact that you can have one system (GNU/Linux) and don't have any binaries for other (GNU/Hurd), only sources for mach, hurd, gcc, glibc and can piece by piece (cross-)compile everything and get a working system (with gcc! you compile it by cross-gcc which you compile from your native gcc). And yes, /dev/null is just translator (think of it as mount point), user-space program discarding stdin. Oh, and / is just a translator giving access to /dev/hdX
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  Wait, these are all separate processes? What happens if you crash / ?
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    The service restarts. What happens if you crash the Linux kernel? I'm a happy monolithic kernel user, but there are some great ideas in the microkernel model. Just seems to never quite be the best practical choice except in some niches.
    - Florin_Andrei 13y ago
      I was not criticizing, I was genuinely curious. Okay then, I donwloaded Debian Hurd and made a VirtualBox image out of it. This should be fun.
  - lelf 13y ago
    Yep, user space. It will be restarted. (Note that I may lie to you about /, it's somewhat special and I don't remember details). Edit: oh, and when it crashes it will get handled by crash server (you guessed it, user-space program) which can kill/suspend/coredump it. You can choose even by env variable!
    - chrisdevereux 13y ago
      What happens if you crash the crash server?

69 points by sciurus 13y ago

As time goes on GNU HURD becomes sadder and sadder :/ They can't even seem to be consistently settled on their basics like what micro kernel they are using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurd#Other_microkernels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurd#Other_microkernels In the 2000s they experimented with 3 other micro kernels, all of which went "no where". Over half a decade spending their limited dev resources on work that ultimately went no where since they are still apparently using Mach. and now (from the article): - GNU/Hurd 2013 is available for the 32-bit x86 architecture only - Hurd can currently only make use of one CPU (or CPU core). That is to say, it will still run on multi-core and SMP machines, but only utilizing a single processor. - Hurd generally uses device drivers ported from Linux 2.0 ... So the latest and greatest shiny hardware might cause trouble. Once upon a time if you could get it to run on your hardware it was at least vaguely competitive, but now the thought of putting it on my 64bit quad core laptop... well... what a waste. And instead of trying to even keep up, they are still trying to pick the right micro kernel... "In years past, Richard Stallman was quoted as saying that Linux was a good option to use while the Hurd was still incomplete"

jared314 13y ago
I wonder what could be done to actually turn the project around. There are articles on HN almost everyday about small project management this and agile that. What might actually help this project?
- michaelhoffman 13y ago
  The first thing they would need is a compelling reason for people to spend their time on the project.
greenlakejake 13y ago
"In years past, Richard Stallman was quoted as saying that Linux was a good option to use while the Hurd was still incomplete" Linux will remain a good option for a long time.
p9idf 13y ago
The Hurd authors might find your part-time projects just as sad and pathetic as you find theirs. There's not much I can say beyond that, since you've based your judgement on vague and wishy-washy concepts like going somewhere, being "vaguely competitive", and keeping up. It's no business of yours to criticize the direction of a project you have no involvement or stake in, especially when you can't articulate what direction you'd prefer.
- mindstab 13y ago
  The problem is HURD isn't positioned as a part time product, it's positioned as a replacement to Linux, which is inferior technically, just has more hands on deck right now. I'm not so scornful of the many many many other OS projects out there because they don't generally act like they are better than all that exists and going to naturally supplant it if they can just find the right microkernel... Also very few "side projectS" have been going on for like 25 years... So again my personal side projects are hard to compare to an organization's quarter century effort. Direction I'd prefer? Working on modern hardware and taking full advantage of it! Was that not clear? That's the whole point. They spend all their time on on designing and redesigning archetecture and their software is now getting less relevant on real hardware. Mostly only makes sense now to run as a VM. Which is probably not what they want for the OS that is supposed to replace Linux....
- greenlakejake 13y ago
  My sad and pathetic part-time projects don't drag on for 25 years. :)

m0th87 13y ago

Hurd is one of those pieces of tech that just makes me sad. Performance implications aside, micro-kernels feel so much more "right". It feels like proper software engineering techniques applied to the kernel-level. How cool would it be to be able to, e.g. replace the default scheduler with something that satisfies your niche requirements? But in Hurd's quarter century of life, it's gone nowhere, while Linux, Windows and OS X have zipped by. It feels like nothing short of an apocalypse will bring the micro-kernel back. I think the only major one in the wild in QNX (Blackberry OS), and that's waning. OS X / NT are no longer microkernels. "Worse is better" still rings true, in more ways than one.

protomyth 13y ago
Components were very successful with Visual Basic, but (despite the C# description[1]) haven't really been front and center in languages and operating systems. I honestly think it is because we don't have something at the bottom that was built components first. Decoupling designs is hard, and we get systems of objects and not components. 1) 2nd paragraph of introduction http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=7029 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id...
strictfp 13y ago
Remember that microkernels aren't just trying to achieve modularity - they also take a stab at robustness by failure recovery. This is IMO doomed to fail - you are much better off trying to achieve robustness by correctness. Monolithic kernels focus more on correctness and therefore progress much faster.
- rookieMP 13y ago
  MINIX seems to be working pretty well these days.
- cwzwarich 13y ago
  Most of the kernels that try very hard to achieve correctness (in the embedded / real-time space that would be used in military or aerospace applications) are microkernels. Microkernels have a smaller number of primitives that are more orthogonal, so they are easier to implement correctly and audit them, and you get some amount of preemptibility for free. Also, as far as I know, the only kernel that has been proven correct with a mechanically verifiable proof is an L4 variant.

rookieMP 13y ago

A lot of people will point and laugh at HURD, calling it a really sad project or whatever. Why? Considering the small number of developers, it has come along spectacularly. Over time, HURD has been improving at a decently consistent rate. I remember a time when it was nearly impossible to get it running even on QEMU. God damn people, sure it's missing features; but those features don't inhibit it running. I, for one, am glad that they decided to get it stable before they get it fast. I will always wait for the day I can say my computer runs GNU. Nothing else, just GNU.

papsosouid 13y ago
Why? Because in the time HURD has sat around trying to figure out whose code to use and call HURD, other people have actually written useful kernels. Minix for example.
- rookieMP 13y ago
  Minix was first released in 87, three years before development on HURD even began. Yeah, okay, that was just nitpicking. But they're not doing that anymore, so why bother complaining about it anymore? Sure, it's not up to snuff yet, but perhaps it will be decently soon. Development on HURD has really surged in the past year or two, I'd like to say.
  - papsosouid 13y ago
    >Minix was first released in 87, three years before development on HURD even began. Minix wasn't an attempt at a production kernel in 1987. Minix 1 and Minix 2 were purely for teaching. Minix 3 was a completely new project, and wasn't started until 2005. >but perhaps it will be decently soon The history of the project and its current state suggest that is unlikely. >Development on HURD has really surged in the past year or two, I'd like to say. You might very well like to say that, but that doesn't mean it is true. There are no competent systems programmers working for/with GNU, it is highly unlikely that the random assortment of people chosen for their politics rather than their skillset will be able to turn the longest festering mess of code ever into a production ready kernel.

lelf 13y ago

I tried it long time ago. And it's something magical about the fact that you can have one system (GNU/Linux) and don't have any binaries for other (GNU/Hurd), only sources for mach, hurd, gcc, glibc and can piece by piece (cross-)compile everything and get a working system (with gcc! you compile it by cross-gcc which you compile from your native gcc). And yes, /dev/null is just translator (think of it as mount point), user-space program discarding stdin. Oh, and / is just a translator giving access to /dev/hdX

Florin_Andrei 13y ago
Wait, these are all separate processes? What happens if you crash / ?
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  The service restarts. What happens if you crash the Linux kernel? I'm a happy monolithic kernel user, but there are some great ideas in the microkernel model. Just seems to never quite be the best practical choice except in some niches.
  - Florin_Andrei 13y ago
    I was not criticizing, I was genuinely curious. Okay then, I donwloaded Debian Hurd and made a VirtualBox image out of it. This should be fun.
- lelf 13y ago
  Yep, user space. It will be restarted. (Note that I may lie to you about /, it's somewhat special and I don't remember details). Edit: oh, and when it crashes it will get handled by crash server (you guessed it, user-space program) which can kill/suspend/coredump it. You can choose even by env variable!
  - chrisdevereux 13y ago
    What happens if you crash the crash server?