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GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

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151–160 of 163 posts

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#151
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox isn’t io bound it is spending a ton of CPU parsing network buffers and rendering UI.

Nginx is IO bound in general - for my headless go stateful server, i could get syscall6 up to 20% of the profile time. It was a fight between GC in the gRPC code allocating for headers and the syscall6 for top single profile footprint.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of rewriting Bun, maybe Anthropic should have thrown some tokens at finishing Hurd.

I hold out hope for (human) work to coalesce on creating a stable/secure microkernel (SeL4 anybody???) and getting it mature enough to build an OS on. Once that is done, then you build out the absolutely massive collection of userspace drivers that would be needed to replace linux by leveraging LLMs and other automated techniques. The good part is that by keeping the drivers in userspace, the security risk of generat…

I thought work was finished to allow Hurd to use Linux device driver code as is?

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of the user space programs were from gnu. Compiler was from gnu The initial filesystem was minix The kernel was Linux. So I would say Linus had 100s of man years of ecosystem he could benefit from and that is the oss spirit. But yeah he did not write a shell or an editor or Compiler etc and the kernel was of course oriented towards an unix like os.imagine you would have had to start from scratch, if you had just…

> imagine you would have had to start from scratch, if you had just had a PC and a bios. Like templeOS I guess

TempleOS blows my mind, honestly.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#154
post #16

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

I wish that there was one day where I could log in and just feel like I was on the HN that existed when I first got my account. A day with a moratorium on all posting about LLMs, LLM startups, generative AI, just actual Hacker News, i.e. news which is interesting to hackers, and not a compendium of every terrible antisocial Bay Area echo chamber idea being sold as humanity's savior by narcissists with God complexes.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#155
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same people are perfectly fine with Electron crap all over the place, they don't really care about overhead.

Not true in a data center - 20% less work for same CPU is like 25% more cores needed for any applications where the scaling is driven by CPU utilization. That is $ - and people have made things so far from efficient many medium size companies have 100k cores to pay for.

I'm having a hard time believing that data centers are chomping at the bit to use the Hurd.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#156
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox isn’t io bound it is spending a ton of CPU parsing network buffers and rendering UI. Nginx is IO bound in general - for my headless go stateful server, i could get syscall6 up to 20% of the profile time. It was a fight between GC in the gRPC code allocating for headers and the syscall6 for top single profile footprint.

Looking forward to reading the results of your benchmarking Hurd vs. Linux.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#157
post #154
post #16

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

I wish that there was one day where I could log in and just feel like I was on the HN that existed when I first got my account. A day with a moratorium on all posting about LLMs, LLM startups, generative AI, just actual Hacker News, i.e. news which is interesting to hackers, and not a compendium of every terrible antisocial Bay Area echo chamber idea being sold as humanity's savior by narcissists with God complexes.

You might not be able to do that, but you can visit the HN front page as it existed on pretty much any arbitrary date in the past.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2015-08-05

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efforts people will go to in order to avoid GPL3. Makes you wonder why?

Because large corporations want to take without giving.

Yep, look at Apples 12 year journey of rebuilding everything that was moved up to GPL3.

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#159
post #16

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

This entire site is a propaganda piece for one of the largest incubators in tech. Just because it has “hacker” in the name doesn’t mean it represents tech. Like, the point is tech making money. You’re in the wrong place if you’re looking for something other than that.

Where is the real hacker community then?

Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

#160
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that there was one day where I could log in and just feel like I was on the HN that existed when I first got my account. A day with a moratorium on all posting about LLMs, LLM startups, generative AI, just actual Hacker News, i.e. news which is interesting to hackers, and not a compendium of every terrible antisocial Bay Area echo chamber idea being sold as humanity's savior by narcissists with God complexes.

You might not be able to do that, but you can visit the HN front page as it existed on pretty much any arbitrary date in the past. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2015-08-05

Nothing changes in 11 years.

* Apple sucks

* The internet is too centralised

* The financial system is unstable

* Browsers got a new API

* Some communist country regulated tech

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