GNU Hurd in Google Summer of Code 2011

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/gsoc.html

by tjr • 15 years ago

34 23 15 years ago

iwwr• 15 years ago

HURD is 11 years older than Duke Nukem Forever, if that puts things in perspective. Is it the oldest (ongoing) major software project that has yet to ship?

IvarTJ• 15 years ago

The hypertext project Xanadu, founded in 1960.

wmf3• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure Xanadu was finally canceled.

amock3• 15 years ago

I used to think that microkernels would eventually become the architecture of choice for desktops and it's nice to see that Hurd is still making progress in that direction. It seems like such an obvious reliability improvement to move as much as possible to user space and as hardware progresses we should be able to make the performance good enough.

snippyhollow• 15 years ago

Mac OS X is using a Mach microkernel.

wmf3• 15 years ago

Not really. AFAIK, NeXTSTEP/OS X is based on Mach 2.x which wasn't really a microkernel (the BSD code wasn't moved to userspace until 3.0).

ajslater5• 15 years ago

They are. They're called hypervisors. The way I hear it Xen et alia are the new hotness in deploying Windows across the org in IT.

amock3• 15 years ago

Have you heard of any major deployments of software directly on top of Xen? I know that HaLVM (http://halvm.org/wiki/) supports doing that but I haven't heard of any production uses for it. Some things, like stateless web servers, seem like they'd be a great fit for deploying on top of Xen.

handrake• 15 years ago

It's one of my dreams to see it ship and I use it as my primary OS.

onan_barbarian• 15 years ago

These projects violate the spirit and traditions of GNU Hurd, by not including a 'rewrite the system to change the underlying microkernel to something else' project.

We are way overdue for one of these changes. Who will step up to add to the long list (Mach / L4 / Coyotos / Viegoos / back to Mach) of Hurd would-be microkernels?

Bonus points for multiple competing projects in that space...

wmf3• 15 years ago

In honor of Frans Kaashoek, I suggest porting Hurd to XOmB. http://wiki.xomb.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

darrylring• 15 years ago

2011 is the year of the Hurd desktop.

ajslater5• 15 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/ulaQV.jpg

pgbovine• 15 years ago

interesting ... i don't know about stallman's involvement in Hurd, but iirc he's been pretty critical of all major software companies, even ones like Google that are friendly to the open-source community. i wonder how he feels about Hurd participating in Summer of Code.

tjr• 15 years ago

Project GNU has participated in the Google Summer of Code in several past years; here's a little more info:

http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/guidelines.html

tzs• 15 years ago

I don't understand how Hurd has taken so long. The GNU project managed to get gcc out, and compilers are harder than kernels. At least, that's how it seems to me as a former Unix kernel hacker. I've had occasion to replace the stock process and memory handling with new implementations of my own from scratch, so I've been pretty deep into the system, and so don't think I've missed some hidden vein of difficulty.

GNU Hurd in Google Summer of Code 2011

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