Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

phoronix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#11

Post by philipwhiuk »

hayleox wrote: post #7
taylodl wrote: post #2

This headline was pretty much true 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago... Don't get me wrong, I think Hurd is interesting, but I seriously doubt it's going to have a big impact on anything as it reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.

The "75% of Debian archive builds" claim is exactly the same 7 years ago. In fact, look at this slide from the 2019 presentation: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/roadmap_for_t... (page 8) It is barely distinguishable from the first slide featured in the Phoronix article from today: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2026&image=gnu_hurd_1 It seems like there has been progress on other fronts, so I'm…

> so I'm not sure why Phoronix ran a headline focused on very old news.

It's just coverage of FOSDEM 2026 and I guess they assumed that the FOSDEM slides would show notable changes rather than the state of play.

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#13

Post by acheron »

While I laughed at the headline, it also fondly reminds me of reading Slashdot in the late 90s-early 00s, back before the Internet and programming and computers had all gone to shit.

Good luck guys. At least working on this for decades is less damaging to the world than anything people do at Google and Facebook.

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#14

Post by hgs3 »

taylodl wrote: post #2

This headline was pretty much true 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago... Don't get me wrong, I think Hurd is interesting, but I seriously doubt it's going to have a big impact on anything as it reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.

> reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.

It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#16

Post by wolvoleo »

hgs3 wrote: post #14
taylodl wrote: post #2

This headline was pretty much true 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago... Don't get me wrong, I think Hurd is interesting, but I seriously doubt it's going to have a big impact on anything as it reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s.

> reflects the software engineering philosophies of the 1980s. It has a microkernel architecture. That's already an improvement over the "modern" monolithic kernels we are stuck with today. Given Big Tech's interest in hardening security and sandboxing you'd think this would get more attention.

True but it's not exactly new. I remember Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvald's heated discussions in the early 90s :) Minix featured a microkernel before linux existed.

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#17

Post by wolvoleo »

imglorp wrote: post #4
mannyv wrote: post #3

"Hurd Isn't Soup"

Hurd Uses Repurposed Debian

To be fair, GNU/Linux distros like Debian lean very heavily on the GNU part. They owe a lot to the GSF and its work is highly praised.

Just their kernel somehow seems to be stuck in vaporware status. Probably because a lot of developers would think "why work on this when we already have Linux" which is a fair point too.

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#18

Post by imglorp »

wolvoleo wrote: post #17
imglorp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hurd Uses Repurposed Debian

To be fair, GNU/Linux distros like Debian lean very heavily on the GNU part. They owe a lot to the GSF and its work is highly praised. Just their kernel somehow seems to be stuck in vaporware status. Probably because a lot of developers would think "why work on this when we already have Linux" which is a fair point too.

I wonder if microkernels more relevant now than ever given their reduced attack surface, and also the recent availability of more cores.

One big criticism from decades ago was the loss in efficiency. But what's changed since microkernels were conceived is how many processor cores are available to offload userspace drivers from the kernel.

Is this a valid viewpoint? Is it time for microkernels to overtake monolithic kernels?

Re: GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building

#20

Post by rurban »

imglorp wrote: post #18
wolvoleo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, GNU/Linux distros like Debian lean very heavily on the GNU part. They owe a lot to the GSF and its work is highly praised. Just their kernel somehow seems to be stuck in vaporware status. Probably because a lot of developers would think "why work on this when we already have Linux" which is a fair point too.

I wonder if microkernels more relevant now than ever given their reduced attack surface, and also the recent availability of more cores. One big criticism from decades ago was the loss in efficiency. But what's changed since microkernels were conceived is how many processor cores are available to offload userspace drivers from the kernel. Is this a valid viewpoint? Is it time for microkernels to overtake monolithic k…

They already did. There are more microkernels around than monolithic. All big CPU's use them internally, all phones use them.
Post reply on HN