GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2 • Hacker News Board

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#91

Post by floxy » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

panick21_ wrote: post #65

floxy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?

Yes, you want to do more IPC, its basically linear with the increase in performance. So the amount of overhead stays the same basically. At least in IPC benchmarks and those tend to be important. Making that fast is fundamental to any OS.

So for an I/O heavy program like a web browser, what percentage of CPU time is spent in syscalls? Someone must have that data for Firefox. 1%? 10%? And then that moves to 1.1% (or 11%)? And then every other program is even less affected? Curious if anyone is in the know.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#92

Post by floxy » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #75

doubled112 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see just powering through because modern hardware is fast enough to do so being an option. Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.

People lost their shit when Spectre mitigations added 20% overhead to kernel calls though. Why wouldn't they do the same for microkernel overhead?

If people really cared about performance, we'd be doing something other than the bloated way we have been doing things.

https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#93

Post by ColdStream » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

shaggie76 wrote: post #76

I can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical. I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old a…

There was a brief period about 10 years back where there was a sudden burst of activity on Hurd, but that started to dwindle shortly afterwards. Alas, it is like Fusion power, always moving forwards but under funded to get it across the line into something more.

For every year development Hurd moves forward, so does everyone else's, only the they have much more resources.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#94

Post by floxy » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 1:22 AM UTC

darksaints wrote: post #67

csb6 wrote: post #15

Does anyone more familiar with Hurd know how they addressed performance issues encountered by other Mach-based kernels? I remember reading that one of Mach's bottlenecks was validating that each IPC message had proper permissions/access when sending them between processes due to the large number and frequency of messages.

Mach's problem wasn't that it had slow IPC, but rather that in terms of microkernels, Mach was pretty damn big. There are some very fast microkernels out there, like the L4 family, which negate the IPC overhead of microkernels by being small enough to fit entirely in the L2 cache of most processors. Linux may only have the single IPC call per round trip, but it's a fucking huge kernel and there is typically a ton of…

>small enough to fit entirely in the L2 cache

Shouldn't the "hot" path fit in the L1 of a "modern" processor (100 kB+)?

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#95

Post by voxelghost » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 1:32 AM UTC

sirsinsalot wrote: post #3

I hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.

Next year will be the year of Hurd on the desktop, I am sure of it.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#96

Post by bofadeez » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #18

metalliqaz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really what everyone means. However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction

This should be a lesson about providing a product versus providing a technology. Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a gamebox." Of course, people don't actually want gameboxes either - they want to play games - but it's a few steps clos…

[flagged]

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#97

Post by ButlerianJihad » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #16

Cool to finally see some small silly tech stuff here that isn't trying to make money.

  From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
  Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
  Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
  Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT

  Hello everybody out there using minix -

  I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
  professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones...

  ...PS.  Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
  It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
  will support anything other than AT-harddisks...

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#98

Post by kristopolous » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 2:13 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #46

maplant wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, just Linux.

Yeah GNU hasn't really been involved for a long time. It's Mozilla/Linux in reality. Not to mention the totally GNU-free distributions, like Alpine.

If you read the historical archives, Gnu was kinda late in the game with Linux. They were distributing the Joliets 386-BSD and NetBSD and had some drama with trying to do Linux. Debian is a historical spinoff of this.

I gave a conference talk about this about 4 years ago. There may be slight errors in my recollection

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#99

Post by 0xpgm » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

api wrote: post #68

Someone should do the blasphemous thing and have Opus 5 finish HURD. Actually in all seriousness reviving dead interesting FOSS projects is one use for AI coding I've thought about.

Are AIs good enough at doing novel work that they have yet to encounter?

My guess is that the GNU/HURD people are doing a lot of novel work that doesn't yet exist.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#100

Post by adastra22 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 3:23 AM UTC

maplant wrote: post #40

oytis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are calling a Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux) killer small silly stuff?

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, just Linux.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact systemd/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, systemd plus Linux.

Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather one more free component of a fully functioning systemd system, made useful by the systemd unit files, target definitions and vital service managers comprising a full OS as defined by Lennart Poettering.

Many computer users run a modified version of the systemd system every day without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of systemd which is widely used today is often called "Linux," and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the systemd system, developed by the systemd project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. Chiefly systemd-udevd, systemd-journald, systemd-resolved, systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd, systemd-logind, systemd-homed, systemd-boot, and systemd-oomd, which decides which of your remaining programs deserve to live The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete set of systemd unit files.