First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD

wikinerd writes "The GNU Project was working on a new OS kernel called HURD from 1990, using the GNU Mach microkernel. However, when HURD-Mach was able to run a GUI and a browser, the developers decided to start from scratch and port the project to the high-performance L4 microkernel. As a result development was slowed by years, but now HURD developer Marcus Brinkmann made a historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4. He says: 'We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!'"

Benchmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast is GNU/HURD compared to GNU/Linux? How about non-GNU/Linux?

It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

To me HURD is like, well, like a missed opportunity.

Mods...

[GreyWolf3000]

Please mod down any posts that mention Duke Nukem: Forever.

Except this one, of course.

Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[ggvaidya]

... if GNU/HURD comes out before Longhorn?

what about second?

[nocomment]

Maybe the second program should be a better web server.

what 1st program?

[spongman]

that 1st program wasn't a web server by any chance, was it?

Dilbert

[john-gal]

Reminds me of the Dilbert comic strip where an old man waves a piece of paper around and says "At last, I have formed a strategy that is acceptable to all departments. Now if only there were a way to reproduce text from one piece of paper to many."

Re:Mods...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing it will be more Daikatana than DNF.

GNU-Mach was just plain Mach in 1990

[avidday]

Mach was still an active CMU project when the Hurd glacier began its very slow creep from the peaks of lofty idealism towards the throng of onlookers waiting patiently for the free unix kernel they always craved to reach them. I understand there are actually a few brave souls still standing there waiting.....

Re:It hurds

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could decide to restart it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

"hello, world" anytime soon ?

[anti-NAT]

How much time would it take to port it over ?

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care what the critics are "saying", Hurd is ready for the desktop already. They've got a solid kernel, the GNU system, and can run applications to main().

All this ballyhoo about Hurd not being ready for the desktop is FUD from M$FT. You guys can stay with your buggy OS, I'll be happily hacking away on my *modern* operating system.

Linux is dying...

[tabkey12]

Netcraft confirms

I, for one, welcome our new L4 overlords!

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[njvic]

Come on... Microsoft will never live up to HURD. Everybody knows it takes many Longhorns to make one HURD.

*ducks*

Re:In the words of Linus...

[Ohreally_factor]

I do hope that /. in 2006 doesn't have a new flame topic:

HURD v Linux

Let me be the first to post the Kottke/HURD troll.

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you HURD fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. Then it hit me. This doesn't even have a files system yet. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running Gentoo, which by all standards should be a lot slower than HURD, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, FireFox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even VIM is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on HURD, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a HURD that has run faster than its Linux counterpart, despite the HURD's' micro kernel architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3.5 Ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that L4 is a superior kernel.

HURD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use HURD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

historical document

[groomed]

I am MR MBOTO SHAW, Testamentory Executor of the Will of joe_bruin by appointment and prior arrangements made by the Township of KWANZAA-TOBOGO. After further investigation of his Next of Kin proved fruitless, I come to you in utmost Confidentiality so that the fruits of this old man's labor will not get into the hands of corrupt Township officials.

Date: Unknown
Place: Slashdot

when me and richard m. stallman (the m stands for 'merryweather', did
you know that?) started GNU/hurd back in 1908, we were out to replace
the closed-internals of the international business machines (ibm)
automatic punch card tabulator, which was at use at the time in the
department of the census (where me and rich were summer interns).
those machines had a 2mm steel case sealed with canadian metric square
screws (wherever you call them, please don't correct me). since nobody
had any metric screwdrivers at the time, much less square ones, we had
no access to the internal cogs and wheels of the tabulator. we
definitely did not want to punch through the casing, because that
would void our warranty and service contract, and we would have to
contract ibm to build us a second tabulator (which cost nearly 200
american dollars, and took 7 months to assemble).

when it (frequently) broke down, we had to call an ibm machinist to
come open the case for us and oil the flywheel or unjam the transverse
flying arm on the card-feeder. as you can imagine, this seemed hardly
the ideal solution, because usually all it needed was a little bit of
work that me and rich could easily perform (even through we were not
trained calculating machine operators).
long story short, we starting working on the GNU/hurd tabulator. the
centerpiece to our system was the pipelined card loader, which could
load the next punchcard while the calculating engine was stilll
churning on the previous card. we had also designed the system so that
you could have dual loading mechanisms, so that one would always be
running if the other jammed. rich always insisted that we should
publish the blueprints for our machine, so that other people in our
tabulation club could also build similar machines, and help us with
the design. to me the whole idea sounded a bit bolshevik, but richard
seemed intent to follow through with it, and i didn't mind so much.
honestly, i didn't believe he would ever be able to publish anything,
given that his handwriting was quite terrible (although he was working
on a new type of typewriter, the electro-macs so that he would be
somewhat more legible).

5 years later, when i was conscripted to join the great war in europe,
we had a nearly complete tabulator in hand. we had solved nearly all
the problems of page clipping and bending that were present in our
earlier builds, and our machine could run at a rate of well over 70
cards per minute (compared to the ibm's 42). however, we never
completed the loader fully, and the latest model i saw could only hold
3 cards on the loading queue, making it much less than useful (however
promising).

i've lost contact with rich during the war years. i had always assumed
he's been killed in action. anyway, i'm glad to see he's still going
strong with our GNU/hurd tabulator, and wish him well on it. hopefully
it will be done before my great grandkids graduate college.

-- joe_bruin @ slashdot

Re:Let's see here

[ThousandStars]

Whould you ever reconsider you're spelling of 'would'?

I'm sure he would, if you will reconsider your use of the contraction "you're [wsu.edu]."

Re:choose a new name for a new kernel

[Tumbleweed]

The L4Ka-based kernel is a new project that sounds like it has a lot of promise

I don't think something called "El Forka" sounds all that inspiring.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[commodoresloat]

All this ballyhoo about Hurd not being ready for the desktop is FUD from M$FT.

Uhhh, yeah. That ummmm big anti-HURD ad campaign that Microsoft is running on all the TV stations.

Re:Mods...

[wolrahnaes]

"(I hope I'm not just being really really slow and that everybody else got the joke on day one ;)"

yes, you are and yes, we did.

Re:what about second?

[mangu]

Do you mean that, since they finally got to the stage where Linux was in 1991, they should now start rewriting Apache from scratch?

Re:Mods...

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Dude, no! It's going to be the launch title for the Infinium Labs portable, which comes complete with a sticker that triples the battery life!

Re:More interested in development

[essreenim]

Get back to work, and stop waisting time. Have you downloaded that Debian ISO for me yet?
No? Then get back to work.

Re:Let's see here

[fr0dicus]

Is that silence because you can't configure your soundcard properly?

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[Anonymous Coward]

The real power to a microkernel comes from the modularity. It is much easier to maintain several small programs than one large one.

GNU/HURD the microkernel from the people who brought you Emacs.

Re:It hurds

[halivar]

it just took time to emerge

Damn, those Gentoo guys don't miss a beat, do they?

Re:It hurds

[mpathetiq]

Hopefully I'll evolution to a being that uses HTML properly... dammit.

Re:I just deleted Dilbert from my RSS reader

[renderhead]

Funny... he's not going to miss you...

You're all a bunch of whiners. Either the strip is funny, or it's not. If it's not, don't read it and shut the hell up. Boycotting a strip that you're reading for free every day is not going to affect anything.

Re:Statistics from my slashdotted site

[zoomba]

So basically you're saying that All Slashdotters use Operating System XYZ and Browser ABC, except for when they don't. :P

Your statistics have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yes, we use computers and web browsers to view web sites.

Bravo :)

1st program?

[newandyh-r]

... and I was expecting "Hello world!"

Re:Mach Microkernel vs L4

[garethwi]

Well, this is fairly wrong but some of the truth is there.

A 'ring' of truth, perhaps?

Re:what about second?

[pommiekiwifruit]

It's the open-source way. After that, they can write a better text editor.

Re:Dyu think Microsoft will ever live it down ...

[djdavetrouble]

Mark my words, 2005 will be the year of HURD on the desktop.
I am going to start a project to rename every friggin FOSS project there is to gain popularity. I happen to know a little about publicity and advertising, and I can tell you right off the bat that products like the gimp, hurd, lame, gnu, etc etc will never gain widespread acceptance until they have a more marketable name. Case in point: Mozilla --> Firefox.

Hurd will now be known as (dropping all of the stupid recursive abbreviation crap that RMS is so fond of) FUTURINO OPERATING SYSTEM .

The Gimp will now be called PHOTOFRIEND.

Lame is hereby dubbed - MUSICSHRINK 5000.

Gnu/Emacs shall become - WORD-O-LATOR FREE

and so on...

Re:Dilbert is bad, very bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is union busing? Is that free trips for senior citizens to the pipefitters?