LWN: Comments on "Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters"

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

dirtyepic — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:07:28 +0000

Yes, congrats, it's the Carrot Top of the kernel world.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

nix — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:18:45 +0000

Duke Nukem Forever is much younger than the Hurd. :/

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

flewellyn — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:18:14 +0000

Probably not.

The sad thing is, there IS interesting development happening in microkernel designs in the open source world. Coyotos, for instance. I don't get why Hurd is unable to make any progress.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

azrael — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:07:36 +0000

Am I the only one that reading this immediately have thought about Duke Nukem Forever changing engines?

Can Minix3 run GNU?

sbergman27 — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:19:38 +0000

"""
So Minix and Hurd have different goals.
"""

Perhaps. Insofar as Minix3 ( http://www.minix3.org/ ) actually and currently *has* goals. Minix3 is only loosely based upon the version 1 and 2 releases, which were, indeed, designed for educational use. The Minix3 project intends, and is making concrete progress towards, creating a usable, real world OS ala Linux designed around a microkernel. While I'm not a huge fan of Minix3 or of microkernels, Minix3 has a credibility which HURD currently lacks. I'm not sure what particular significance "running GNU" actually has in that context. It's a POSIX-like OS, runs X, and a growing list of officially supported applications ( http://www.minix3.org/software/ ).

Considering that most of the Minix 1 and 2 code is of little or no relevance in light of the new purpose of Minix3, what Minix3 has accomplished it has done in 3 years. What little HURD has accomplished has taken 18 years.

It looks to me like "stagnant vs vibrant" is a more significant difference between the two projects than are "different goals" or "running GNU". Who want's to work on something that is going nowhere, regardless of what its goals and aspirations might, at one time, have been?

Can Minix3 run GNU?

coriordan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:46:40 +0000

Hurd never had simply the academic goal to develop a microkernel. It had the practical goal to develop a microkernel for the Unix-like GNU operating system.

Minix3 exists, and that's probably great for enthusiasts of the microkernel architecture, but AFAIK it can't be used as the kernel for a Unix-like OS such as the GNU system. The Linux kernel can do this, as can the kernels of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris (but they're not microkernels, of course). The Hurd can already be used as the kernel for a GNU system, but it's capabilities are limited.

So Minix and Hurd have different goals.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

sbergman27 — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:49:27 +0000

Keeping an audience entertained for years on end can hardly be considered "nothing much" as any veteran stage comedian will attest. Carol Burnett decided to gracefully end her show after 11 years. HURD's been at it for 18 and will no doubt continue until the gong or the hook is employed.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

bronson — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:45:25 +0000

Ya, but it can spin each wheel individually!

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

flewellyn — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:57:17 +0000

Huh. So, basically, Hurd continues as it always has: spinning its wheels while accomplishing nothing much?

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

mbanck — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:50:42 +0000

The Hurd project uses a one-ChangeLog-per-directory approach; the top-level ChangeLog file mostly has build system changes.

That said, not that much code has been committed to the HEAD branch lately; however the Summer of code branches did see quite some activity naturally. Also the GNU Mach Xen-branch has seen lots of changes.

Michael

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

drag — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:37:08 +0000

Last time I checked the development effort dwindled down to just a bunch of die-hard people that love nothing more then having endless discussions about architecture.

-------------------------

For the MACH-based kernel, which is the one that actually somewhat worts, they've stopped all development completely. This is the kernel being discussed by the article.

The L4 kernel is what they are focusing on and as far as I know it's not remotely close to being functional.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

flewellyn — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:24:37 +0000

I thought they were porting from Mach to L4? What happened to that?

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

sbergman27 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:38:02 +0000

I'm not sure why anyone *would* want to use or develop a dead OS that was going to be the next big thing in 1990, other than for personal educational purposes. Its one possibly attractive feature was being a Free microkernel posix-like OS. Or at least it was supposed to be the only serious one. But now there's Minix 3, which may not be the the talk of the town, but at least is breathing.

Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

vaib — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:16:17 +0000

I always wonder about Hurd. I can see pretty much nothing in its changelog, on the Hurd mailing list I saw hardly 1-2 mail once a month. Is there any development going on Hurd at all? Does it lack leadership or its just people are not interested developing it as its double effort along with linux kernel.

KVM?

mbanck — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:47:34 +0000

I believe it works fine in general - though somebody recently reported that latest Linux KVM do not boot Mach anymore. I don't think anybody looked into this yet.

Michael

KVM?

salimma — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:45:03 +0000

Considering a lot of Linux distributions are shifting to KVM (Red Hat/Fedora and Ubuntu, for instance), it's quite surprising that it did not merit any mention. Presumably the normal boot image works fine under it -- KVM happily runs newer BSD variants such as Dragonfly, which stomps VMware and VirtualBox -- but it'd be nice to know.