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Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

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Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#211

Post by medo-bear »

noirscape wrote: post #205
medo-bear wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software development definitely needs more ideology, principles, and ethics. When talented hackers get behind a project united on these matters great and interesting features occur spontaneously

When I say ideology, I'm referring moreso to both dogma and bruised egos, both of which the GNU project is rife with. A lot of Hurds continued development is just predicated on "we don't want to admit Linux became a success" rather than any serious principles or ethics. Again, just look at the whole start-stop nature of its development. I don't disagree that a lot of tech professionals could spare at least some basic…

> When I say ideology, I'm referring moreso to both dogma and bruised egos, both of which the GNU project is rife with.

Then just say I don't like that Hurd is part of the GNU Project because I dont like what the latter does. In my opinion, it is very hard to deny that GNU Project / FSF take principles and ethics of software development very seriously. Some people even call them dogmatic for it.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#212

Post by viraptor »

snvzz wrote: post #190
viraptor wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which distribution kernel specifically? If you're running on a VM, you get a cloud kernel in many distros, which is very stripped down for example. On other systems - the modules part still applies - how much are you actually trying to save on the kernel RAM usage? I've got a very average kernel from a distro at 20MB and initramfs at 35MB. They could be twice the size and I would never notice. I appreciate they could…

Literal megabytes of code running in supervisor mode. What could possibly go wrong.

It would be great if they didn't of course. But historically, I've never had issues with kernel patches. In large enough deployments you get everything rolled ahead of the publication, or care enough to run grsec and custom profiles. In smaller ones, the kernel side is far down the list of things you care about.

So yeah, in the ideal world, let's have everything isolated. For now it would be great if they worked at all.

Also... There's a bit of practical limitation to how useful the isolation is. It's cool that the FS module runs in the userspace. But if it can create a suid-equivalent file and point an arbitrary config at it, you're not gaining much.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#213

Post by sharperguy »

predictabl3 wrote: post #203
LambdaComplex wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. Okay, then tell us why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better anyways.

They really should just rename the site CapitalistNews or AntiHackerNews or MiddleManagementNews or PMTechNews. Man, y'all are gonna be so mad when you find out some people work on OSS projects for fun or ideological reasons. Again, a sentiment that needs repeating far too often here, not everything is about, or for, you .

People are missing the point of being asked here.

If "fun" and "idological reasons" are the reason there is a community around the project, then that is in fact the answer to the question, if a little vague.

For people still not understanding, it would be nice to have an explanation of what people find fun about it, especially as a user and not a developer, and what ideological reason exactly are driving it.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#214

Post by al_be_back »

the OS wars haven't been conclusive.

Windows had the lead until about 15yrs ago when suddenly iPhone arrived and it propelled apple/Mac (and by association Linux) back into the game.

in recent years the rise in popularity of CLI, microservices (APIs for everything) and remote working/collaborating is indicative of a market shift, away from monolithic, centralized systems and providers (Cloud aside).

Security + Privacy are more so becoming inseparable, for users all around (private, business, orgs, gov).

I particularly like their concept of user-space servers and translators [1] [2]

[1] A translator is simply a normal program acting as an object server and participating in the Hurd's distributed virtual file system.

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation/transla...

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#215

Post by dale_glass »

davidw wrote: post #45

An idea from the 'Crossing the Chasm' book is to find a niche where whatever characteristics of the product you're working on can win. You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors. What does that look like for Hurd?

Could be impossible?

I mean, any unique features HURD has, Linux can easily copy, like with FUSE.

The safety benefits are kind of dubious, in that we're not in the 90s anymore, restarting Windows 3 times a day. Modern kernels are very stable as it is, so more stability is barely noticeable.

And we have containers and virtualization.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#216

Post by harry8 »

davidw wrote: post #65
harry8 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors. Linux, (not big and professional like gnu), is not going to win but could find a niche somewhere. Hm, ok.

Yep, it found a "niche": people could actually hack on it and get it to do stuff, rather than waiting around for the other thing, which wasn't even really a thing yet anyway. Linux has a large, large established user base at this point. If you want to attract people to a different platform, you need a compelling reason. For people just looking to look/experiment/learn/play, 'something new' that's more easily understo…

I think you missed the point of that comment completely.

Which market segment does linux not totally dominate nowadays? Phones, big servers, embedded devices, HPC... Maybe you could argue desktops? Maybe? Still a very signficant player there however you dice it.

Going back to Linus' original email announcement then apply your framework and you don't predict linux competing anywhere let alone dominating everywhere. How could anyone? Smash Sun, IBM, HP all of them. No chance. None.

The future, it's really hard to predict except in hindsight.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#217

Post by rcxdude »

winter_blue wrote: post #108
weberer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, its mostly drivers. Here's a breakdown of the Linux kernel by lines of code: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Sankey_D...

Wow, I'm surprised by how small the file systems are. On the smaller side, Ext4 at just 21,515 lines, and on the larger side, Btrfs at 55,758 lines. It almost makes me think that writing a new file system in Rust, might actually be a tractable project.

The difficulty in filesystems is generally getting to the point of high enough reliability that people trust then with their data. This is why development and adoption of new ones tends to be slow, not the quantity or complexity of implementation. So for a hobby it's quite accessible because that expectation of reliability isn't there.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#218

Post by rcxdude »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #158
heavyset_go wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux kernel driver API/ABI isn't stable so there's no permanent/versioned interface you can program against that would make out-of-tree drivers non-headache inducing: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-... > You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and you get that only if your driver is in…

This is a great Conway's-law-busting approach. Just because the driver creator is a different human/org to the Kernel maintainers, doesn't mean their code needs to be separate if it makes more practical sense to bundle it all together. Also the "proof of work" of being allowed to add your driver is probably that you are designing and producing actual hardware, so it is hard to troll.

It just produces Conway's law in the other direction (which is smart). Now anyone wanting to use Linux effectively needs to integrate with its development process, which is large part of why it is successful as a project. (However, GNU attempted similar with their lack of an extension interface for GCC and that arguably blew up in their face with LLVM, so it's far from a guaranteed success)

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#219

Post by prettyStandard »

davidw wrote: post #45

An idea from the 'Crossing the Chasm' book is to find a niche where whatever characteristics of the product you're working on can win. You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors. What does that look like for Hurd?

cmrdporcupine has a good answer for this below. Target RISC-V. Does it match the ideology? From my limited understanding, I think so.

Re: Gnu/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way

#220

Post by James_K »

noirscape wrote: post #200
TheDong wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the wrong framing for Hurd. Hurd isn't a "product" that's trying to "win" by beating competitors. It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. You might as well ask "How can my local pick-up basketball team find a niche to make money, like NBA players do? Can we all wear more colorful jerseys so TV stations cover us?" No, that's silly, the point of the pick-up basketball team isn't t…

I mean, if the goal is "install a niche kernel for the sake of it", sure that's... a reason, but all the modern non-mainstream kernels (aka not Darwin or NT) at least have a purpose as to why you'd pick them. * Linux is the de facto kernel used on most servers, has great support and is the third pick after the mainstream kernels for a good reason. It's also usually someone's first introduction to Unix-based systems t…

You bring up Plan9 here as though it isn't in the same boat as Hurd. Hurd also has quirky file system stuff [1] and many other interesting and relatively novel features, but you seem to treat this totally differently from Plan9 with no real reason other than you haven't bothered dto learn about the features of Hurd.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation/transla...

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