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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

#251

Post by taeric »

klodolph wrote: post #236
taeric wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications are usually written to know that anything sent over the network could be lost. You don't usually do the same for sending to the different devices. Are you expecting retry logic in all places sending to a device? We /could/ turn all computation into remote procedure calls. There is plenty of precedence that that will not end well. You do it where you have to. Not everywhere. And fair point on the device l…

> Applications are usually written to know that anything sent over the network could be lost. Generally they are —when you make an HTTP request, the client waits until it receives an HTTP response before it reports success. > We /could/ turn all computation into remote procedure calls. There is plenty of precedence that that will not end well. You do it where you have to. Not everywhere. I think you may be having som…

Microkernels treating every system in the machine as a "service" is literally asking developers to treat everything as a distributed system. No? Was literally a selling point early on in the literature for them.

There are good arguments for this in some environments.

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

#252

Post by taeric »

rcxdude wrote: post #222
taeric wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't fully help? Could actually be more difficult if you let the driver do the TCP ack. And you are likely going to back yourself into a situation where you need TCP between the application and the driver... Remember, at that point, it is just a message pass, as well. There is a good article somewhere about how you have to do end to end for any of this to really work.

If your network stack is running isolated to your wifi driver (with the interface being frames to send and receive), it's fine: the network stack just sees some dropped packets the same as if something else dropped them. If your network stack with your TCP state crashes, then it's a bit trickier: the connection will likely be dropped, which requires an application-level retry, which also will generally already exist…

I would assume that the TCP state would be part of the "networking service" that is isolated from my application. As such, I'm assuming the more complicated situation there.

That said, I don't make too big of a defense of networking being a bad choice. At large, that is literally where you have to do distributed computing anyway; so, agreed a lot of it will be covered for a lot of applications. I was trying to stick to the examples others chose as I'm not really trying to "gotcha" to anyone. My main point was honestly more about how similar that is to how we are today. If you were in a microkernel, is it any easier? Because that is the original goal post here.

I do further question why you'd want to do that for every subsystem interaction, and if you really want to have to redo all kernel context swaps and local message passes if something went wrong locally.

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

#254

Post by themerone »

darksaints wrote: post #231
themerone wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's used QNX in automotive for anything other than infotainment? A lot of people seem to think it's being used for vehicle control systems, but I've never been presented with a credible evidence of widespread use in production vehicles.

BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen are all users of QNX’s safety-certified versions, which I would assume means more than just infotainment.

[flagged]

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

#255

Post by themerone »

darksaints wrote: post #231
themerone wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's used QNX in automotive for anything other than infotainment? A lot of people seem to think it's being used for vehicle control systems, but I've never been presented with a credible evidence of widespread use in production vehicles.

BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen are all users of QNX’s safety-certified versions, which I would assume means more than just infotainment.

Users or licensees, there is a big difference. They could be just be playing around with it in laboratories.

Outside of some vague blackberry press materials, I've never seen anything indicating use in vehicles.

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

#256

Post by ASalazarMX »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #199
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…

> 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.

> why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better

Linux started this way. If Linux reaches a point where it doesn't fill the needs of its users/developers better, they will pivot to another alternative, and Hurd is one of those future alternatives. See it as future insurance.

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

#257

Post by kjs3 »

darksaints wrote: post #77
account-5 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your thoughts on Fuchsia? Not QNX but definitely got billions behind it (until Google kill it that is).

Fuschia is definitely interesting but I don’t really see a lot of non-Google work being done with it and while google is worth billions, it doesn’t seem like they’re investing billions into fuschia specifically. I’d say caution is warranted but it’s certainly a possibility if there were more non-google players in the ecosystem.

Google recently cut a bunch of Fuschia staff and canceled some of it's target IoT products (smart speakers?), didn't they?

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

#258

Post by rekado »

gattilorenz wrote: post #91
rekado wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a list of failing packages with reasons for failure: https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/failed_packages.txt And here's the overview on how many packages have successfully been built vs how many have failed: https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=hurd-i38... The number of packages that can be built have been built; it is not a theoretical number.

thanks for the pointer, it's actually quite interesting. Apparently even (most of) X11 should work then?

Yes, X11 has been working for a long time. Here's a screenshot from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/555566/

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

#259

Post by al_be_back »

qubex wrote: post #242
al_be_back wrote: post #214

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 + Privac…

> apple/Mac (and by association Linux) You mean Android?

no - else i'd have typed google/android :)

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

#260

Post by spookie »

janneke wrote: post #241
spookie wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, as I keep hearing these criticisms around BTRFS, I still don't know why. What is so messy about it? Honest question

Have you tried reading the code? It's twice as large (107KLOC) as ext4 (45KLOC), where ext4 is viewed as a natural evolution of ext2 (7KLOC). 45KLOC of C code already sounds really scary to me, although yeah, journaling is really nice to have.

Yes, that's scary. Understandable, but it does come with a lot of functionality that's nice to have no?
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