GNU Hurd 0.5, GNU Mach 1.4, GNU MIG 1.4 Released 206
jrepin writes "Which day could be better suited for publishing a set of Hurd package releases than the GNU project's 30th birthday? These new releases bundle bug fixes and enhancements done since the last releases more than a decade ago; really too many (both years and improvements) to list them individually, The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux)."
I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Funny)
30 years for Hurd 0.5, so 1.0 will be available in 2043?
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Informative)
GNU is 30 years old, but Hurd is "only" 23. It started while the first Bush was still president rather than Reagan.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Funny)
So they'll complete Hurd 1.0 just in time for the 2038 bug [wikipedia.org]! That gives them 23 more years to go completely 64-bit by then.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Informative)
wrong. the initial failed attempt at HURD started in 1986 with a BSD 4.4 like kernel. The project is thus 27 years old. still not stable, not suitable for any production use, and only runs on i386, it is a failure
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The people in charge of that are so out of touch they should be committed in a mental hospital. It wasn't that long ago they finally supported partitions bigger than 2GB, yes two GigaBytes. Think about that fact while you also learn that RMS uses an old terminal or some such nonsense along with a script to gather Google searches and email the text to him. He lacks a graphical interface.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about that fact while you also learn that RMS uses an old terminal or some such nonsense along with a script to gather Google searches and email the text to him.
If you think about it, it's a fairly effective way of avoiding getting hacked (or at least minimizing the attack surface).
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He's protected from the Snow Crash, but the Blight will still own his computer.
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Meh, the blight will just hack the people in the cubicle next to him and send them over to make him sit in front of the programming screen. No need to hack him through an ASCII terminal. Prepare to be assimilated! (Speaking of which, why do Borgs always say stuff like that? How do you prepare to be assimilated?)
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I thought the Borg said things more along the lines of 'You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile'. Not so much a request to prepare, just a statement that it will happen.
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Meh, the blight will just hack the people in the cubicle next to him and send them over to make him sit in front of the programming screen.
Not this far into the slowness.
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Quickly memorize My Immortal so you'll be spit out and humanity classified as "poisonous - don't eat"?
It works for caterpillars.
He has the source right? (Score:2)
Why should he be worried since he has the source code? Another bombshell for you guys. His systems did not even have passwords until an untrustworthy worker started fucking around.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
The people in charge of that are so out of touch they should be committed in a mental hospital.
Well, aren't you so high and mighty and important shitting on someone else's personal project.
That's all hurd is: it's a small hobby project by a very small number of programmers.
It's not for you, it's for them. Being "in touch" with you is not a requirement.
Oh and by the way, I've no idea what your hobbies are, but I'm sure they suck and you're crap and should be in a mental hospital.
Think about that fact while you also learn that RMS uses an old terminal or some such nonsense along with a script to gather Google searches and email the text to him. He lacks a graphical interface.
Firstly, I already knew that.
Secondly, so what? That's his choice. You know he does that on GNU/Linux, right?
On a MIPS laptop which doesn't even run hurd? You know that too, right?
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I didn't know GNU produced a Linux system. Yes, I know the reference it is the result of petty jealousy and attempt at attention grabbing, nothing more.
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Yeah, none of this addresses my argument.
There are also several systems in my home with large bases of installed GNU tools, that don't run Linux at all.
Linux doesn't need GNU tools. Nobody's arguing with you there.
GNU tools don't need Linux.
But the vast majority of the time, you find them together. Specifically, in all the distributions that some (admittedly persnickety) people like to call GNU/Linux.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:4, Informative)
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Let me try to understand this.
0.5% overhead is fine with you. I am absolutely in agreement with this.
5-10% overhead horrifies you. OK, you're starting to lose me here. 5-10% overhead is canceled out completely by maybe TWO MONTHS of CPU development. It's nothing. Nada.
Anticipation of an implied rise to perhaps 7.5-15% overhead seems to make you reel in dismay. That seems to you to equate to the system grinding to a halt. Funny, in my world it translates to a system which is 85-92.5% as efficient as a theore
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5-10% overhead is canceled out completely by maybe TWO MONTHS of CPU development.
I really wish CPUs were increasing speed at that rate
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Yet playing very briefly with a windows 8 system a few months back (it survived about 20 minutes between arrival at the office and having linux put on it), the kernel and hundreds of intimately-bound-I-don't-know-what-the-fuck-they-do-or-why-I-would-ever-want-them daemons were taking up between 5% and 10% of the CPU constantly.
OEM or corporate install full of crapware? Pure Windows (installed yourself from an OEM/retail disc) is a whole different ballgame, Microsoft actually doesn't add much crap like that. I don't have personal experience with a clean Win8 install, but at least on Win7 it's 99-100% idle when I don't do anything.
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*No, I don't believe that, but Bill Gates certainly wanted US Courts to think so back in the day.
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It is an integral part of the operating system, not the kernel.
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cron is userspace, so that's not an issue, he's talking about kernel-used CPU cycles, of stuff tighly integrated into the lower levels of the OS.
crontab -e will let you edit cron tabs that you distro preconfigured easily, completely unrelated to Linux itself.
And 20 minutes, you say? The Windows box was probably downloading and processing updates. You know, when booting up a Linux which has never been updated, it would also be prudent to have it updated during the first 20 minutes.
Not unless I configure it to do so.
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but other projects have done such things *successfully* and could even be used on a real server to provide a real service, for example minix 3
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And they've been using it to explore some quite interesting ideas in kernel design. The fine-grained compartmentalism that a microkernel provides (at the expense of some performance) is starting to look more attractive in a world where computers run in very hostile environments and yet even a 50% slower kernel would have a negligible impact on user-perceived performance (or battery life).
But are these achievable under Mach? I know that some microkernels seem to be very good - like Chorus, L4 and now Minix 3.x. But has Mach progressed much since 3.0? Only positive thing about it is that it is multi-platform, but w/ just x64 and ARM remaining, that's not saying much.
HURD had experimented w/ a number of microkernels, but I think they'd have done well to fork Minix 3.x and port the HURD there. Oh, and as some noted above, since they are so late, they might as well go directly to 64-bit, a
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Hurd may have been a failure (Score:2)
As a 'product' it may be a dismal failure, but the work getting to it has clearly been not and we every day enjoy the 'collateral successes'.
For all his faults, RMS did help the 'movement' in incalculable ways.
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Christ, and we thought Duke Nukem took forever.
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I was thinking something along those lines myself. To arrive at "1.0" would mean that it would be feature complete and stable according to the "1.0" set defined when "1.0" was created as a target. That already makes me wonder if Hurd is absolete before it has been completed.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Funny)
And in 2063, Steam for Hurd!!!
Re: I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:2)
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Re: I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:2)
I don't think that project will ever get off the ground.
GNU/Hurd time and Valve time intersecting means a catastrophe of epic proportions.
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Just in time for Half-Life 2: Episode 2.2.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes. They plan to speed up its development by rewriting it in Perl 6.
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Well, no. Being a Unix replacement, I'd expect it sometime around 1975.
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30 years for Hurd 0.5, so 1.0 will be available in 2043?
I know I'm being a pedantic pangolin here and ruining your joke without any good reason, but we should still remember that version numbers are not floating point numbers. Rather, they contain groups of integer numbers separated with a dot. So after 0.9 there might still be 0.10, 0.11, etc...
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Not to mention 0.9.1, 0.9.1.1, 0.9.1.1.1 ...
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Any truly long term development project must consider the technological singularity. It is a waste of time and effort not to take advantage of this fabulous opportunity.
Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0 (Score:4, Funny)
Yea. Actually, from a non-linier, non subjective point of view it is more like a big ball of wibbily wobbly timey wimey...stuff
Understatement of the year (Score:3)
"Development of the Hurd has proceeded slowly." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd)
As per http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/status.html [gnu.org]: " It may not be ready for production use, as there are still some bugs and missing features".
Exactly how long has it been like this ? I tracked this project for about a decade until I concluded it would never be ready for production - over a decade ago.
Re:Understatement of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
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It makes glaciation, erosion of canyons, and rise and fall of mountains appear to be blindingly rapid.
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a better day? (Score:2)
Oh, I don't know maybe some day in the early 90's. Back when it would have been useful to me. /kidding only a little.
Time in unpredictable. (Score:2)
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Still, I'm not sure there was ever a 10 year gap between Linux releases.
Proposal: (Score:5, Funny)
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Fork a BSD variant, license it under the GPL, package it with GNU stuff, call it Hurd 1.0.
Just in case you (or anyone else who reads this) is really so ignorant of copyright law, it should be said that forking code that isn't your own does not suddenly turn you from a licensee into a licensor. You can't take a BSD operating system, remove the BSD license, and attach the GPL for at least two reasons: 1) the BSD license forbids distributing sources (or binaries) without a copy of the license (which is the BSD license itself), and 2) you are not the copyright owner of any part of the BSD operating
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It's a fine line here, though. I definitely can legally take your code that you released as BSD, extend or modify it, and release my version as GPL in its entirety. You still retain the copyright on your code, and of course someone could extract your code from my project and use it under the original BSD license. But I as a developer need not make much distinction.
As for your claim the BSD requires the license to be distributed with the code, it doesn't actually say that (never uses the word, "license").
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Fork a BSD variant, license it under the GPL, package it with GNU stuff, call it Hurd 1.0.
I suggested that for the microkernel - just take Minix 3, which is BSDL, fork it, license that under GPL3, package it w/ the HURD services and Emacs, and then call it HURD 1.0
Re:Proposal: (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac users?
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Oh SNAP! Nice one.
(written from OSX...)
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Who would want free BSD software relicensed under a shittier unfree license?
Users of a fork or otherwise copied code, who would like to see the source.
Developers, who see a bugfix or improvement of their code in a fork, and would like to merge that back to their codebase.
Re: Proposal: (Score:2, Insightful)
I license my code under a BSD license, maybe my thought process can help elucidate why someone would do this:
My code does what it says it does. If someone relicenses it, people can always get my source instead. If someone improves it beyond what I did and people want that persons software instead, he's obviously added value to it and I feel he's within his moral rights to license that code anyway he wishes. He did something with it that I was unable, unwilling or too obtuse to do myself and I'm more then ha
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At what percentage of "added value" does this thinking kick in?
That is, if someone takes your code and adds improvements that make up say 5% of the codebase, then thats still predominantly your code and yet that person could be profiting from the entire package.
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More importantly, as a user of person B's package, I have no ability to see those changes or how they achieved those upgrades and am stuck with the original source instead which lacks all those new features to work on my own improvements from.
Relevance? (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly is relevant about Hurd now? The OS landscape has changed and people have moved on. This is really a non-story, aside from the humor value.
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If that's how you think, you've chosen the wrong name. Maybe 'dreambasher' would be more appropriate.
A small handful of technical people have a dream to make a viable microkernel operating system, and they're chasing their dream. Good for them.
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"Moved on"? You make is sound as if Hurd was relevat once!
I really hope it will run... (Score:2)
...on my PowerPC 620...
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Nope, the current plan is to support it on 68060.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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From the NEWS file... (Score:2)
IPv6 support in pfinet, based on Linux 2.2.14.
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i wonder which will be production ready first (Score:2)
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Re:The longest kernel development history... (Score:5, Funny)
...of a kernel that doesn't actually work. Except on Stallman's PC.
Stallman does not possess such devices he runs and developed emacs on a unix VM inside his brain! After realizing that all unix passwords and attempts to hide source code in a binary were useless. The concept of a conceptual computer without passwords and accessed only by obscure command macros written in C exploded from his mind and POOF we had emacs. This was then enhanced by interpreting the commands in binary form but it only worked for those who spoke with a lisp. Then all this went out the Windows when a stiff DOSe of source code was obscured by means of non standard compilers and suddenly word and data processing binaries could easily be obfuscated by hiding the source.
Others tried to change this situation by judiciously applying rubber to source code and the resulting LateXT could be stretched into a usable FLEXable shape, at least until a Bison shat on the source. Stallman HURD about this change in how binaries were now being used and created and GNU for certain that he would have to come out of his brain and actually become the Kernel in charge of parsing things at the source. Because he still insists upon compiling source only in his brain before creating binaries the resulting OS kernel has been extremely slow to take shape because debugging it has given him nightmares whenever he actually sleeps in fact the that the sleep command causes instant dreams that bring him back to the Bill Gates rants he witnessed at computer club meetings in the 1970's.
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Re:Not a replacement for Unix kernel (Score:5, Funny)
I'm looking forward to the Alpha port [nongnu.org], though I'm also hearing good things about Itanium.
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and don't forget about the PPC [nongnu.org] port on that site, with posts all the way into 2003, that project is on fire by HURD standards. We'll finally be able to run HURD on our Macs........*!* oh wait.......
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I once noted that the best CPU for pure FSF/GNU stuff would be a VLIW CPU. Since all the dynamic analysis is done by the compiler, every time a CPU undergoes changes, backwards compatibility should be broken. Bigger register set? Recompile. More branch units? Recompile. More ALUs? Recompile. With all that recompiling that is needed, the FSF goals of software being completely liberated in terms of the source code being always available would be more successfully enforced.
Not that that would apply t
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Does anyone know why this project is stalling so much?
Because there's no strong need for it to be completed. It's progressing the same way as any number of hobbyist open source projects.
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no, show me a hobbyist open source project that went 27 years with nothing usable.
Even Perl 6 hasn't yet sunk to those depths, though it is passing downward to the ocean floor much like a broken Titanic
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no, show me a hobbyist open source project that went 27 years with nothing usable.
Head over to sourceforge and start clicking on random projects. Half-finished projects with minimal practical use are common. The only real difference is that the Hurd gets lots of press despite its state.
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Perl 6 makes progress. It's slow, but it's fairly steady. There has never been a one-year gap in packages, let alone ten years. One of the compilers, Rakudo, is nearly feature complete and then just needs to be optimized. It has monthly releases.
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Re:Stalling... (Score:4, Funny)
Does anyone know why this project is stalling so much?
Cuz it's run by a Stall-man?
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IMHO that's why linux took off and hurd didn't. Linus would take any code that looked like it would fit from anyone that wanted to send it in, then sorted out the rough edges with the help of what became a huge number of people.
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Because there's already an awesome open-source Mach kernel out there: XNU, and it ships with most Apple devices.
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What does GNU Hurd have that Minix 3 does not? They are both microkernels except Minix 3 looks more mature.
GNU Hurd uses a sane license. Minix 3 uses a BSD license, which is unfree.
That's hilarious. (I don't mean just the bit where, like so many FSF fanboys, but not RMS, you can't grasp the difference between "Free" and "Copyleft"; I mean the argument as a whole.)
So HURD's only benefit (that you can think of) is that if some evil company wants to take a microkernel-based UNIX-like, make their changes, and distribute the result without source... they'll be forced to go with Minix 3 (the one that GP says "looks more mature", which you don't seem to dispute) instead of HURD (which you ca
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Bullshit. It's as free as it gets. It's the definition of free. You can do anything with BSD material, including proprietize derived works. That conflicts with some people's concept of subsuming derivative work and making it as open as the original free bits, but that doesn't allow redefining "free" as "free, and forcing yours to be free, too".
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And if Mach's architecture entailed a high overhead on a 16 MHz single core 16020, it would be utterly negligible on today's 3 GHz four core CPU.
Re:When you do this as a hobby (Score:5, Insightful)
things tend to go slow. Real slow. If you want things now, now, now, pay the man/men. It is free, as in someone-else-will-do-it, so you get what you, that's right, didn't pay for.
Fortunately, eventually people found this hobby project [google.com] worth paying for, although I think it proved its worth before the big money started pouring in.
There are, of course, some [freebsd.org] other [netbsd.org] hobby [openbsd.org] projects [dragonflybsd.org] that also manage to support a little more hardware than the Hurd does without huge amounts of money poured into them.
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Are you referring to the recent news of an avian variety?
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Says who? Cyanogenmod taking money from the public is fantastic and means more time working on the project we love.
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I'm curious. How much time and money would using the goo.im updater save for work on other things?
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And why, pray tell, is developing reliable drivers for a microkernel more difficult than for a monolithic kernel? Logic would dictate entirely the reverse.