The Hurd Gets Support For Large Filesystems 58
latroM writes "Finally, after many years of waiting, the Hurd has got support for partitions larger than 2GB. The patch is told to be very stable and its development was started about a year and a half ago. Michael Bank writes: 'I hacked the Debian package so far that I make it build a statically
compiled ext2fs with Ogi's patch (20041029) for partitions > 2GB. For
now, I decided to just copy libpager, libdiskfs and ext2fs to
libpager-ogi, libdiskfs-ogi and ext2fs-ogi, apply his patch and dump the
result as a new patch. Another patch modifies the Makefiles accordingly.' I did some basic tests with those packages and they work fine for me so
far. Any comments on how they work for people and how to possibly improve the packaging and integration of the patch are very welcome."
Hurd development (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't exactly look as if development is proceeding at a roaring pace.
Evolution of HURD (Score:3, Interesting)
While Linux, Windows, etc. have had 2Gb filesystems for a long time, it is nice that HURD supports larger files now.
I'll probably never use it, but I respect the HURD crew for continuing to stay committed to their project, despite HURD being so far behind other kernels.
Re:how can one most easily check out the HURD? (Score:4, Interesting)
In terms of differences - Hurd has very different models of doing things. For example, non-root users can effectively mount filesystems if they have all the permissions needed. There are these things called "translators" which is a bit like FUSE or the other user-space filesystem things you get - essentially, generating a filesystem via a program, so you could mount anything you can script really.
There are lots of other interesting differences. Hurd isn't terribly similar to Linux, and does allow you to do some rather cool things.