The Hurd is still doing its thing. “Jeremie Koenig started working on his Google Summer of Code
project: bringing not only Java to the Hurd, but also fixing or adding missing parts in the Hurd’s components along the way. For example, he already contributed a set of signal handling improvements. Samuel Thibault created the first Debian GNU/Hurd CD set with a graphical installer. You can dowload it at the usual place for Debian CD images.”
Most excellent news, good to know that HURD is still in the works.
I want to ran GNU-Emacs with the GNUstep interface on GNU/Hurd with the GNU-Mach kernel.
The modern version of NeXT
Except that it won’t be as capable as NeXTStep was in the 90s.
Well, it will be also much more. GNUstep can do already more than OpenStep did, as far as the framework is concerned. Application wise of course there is only what open-source provides, we have a host of applications that need some care.
Actually, it is already possible to run GNUstep on Hurd quite well. Most applications work to 90% already, I made them run. Stability is not perfect and some features are missing because the implementation on HURD may be not trivial (like detection of mounted volumes in the Workspace).
But it is already much better than one may think.
Of course other things like Sound or battery information depend on the drivers of HURD…
I hope Mach’s capability of running on multiple cpus will be revamped in GNU-mac, in today’s hyper-threading and multi-core CPUs it would shine, much more than XNU’s “monolithic atop of micro” approac.
Call me when they implement core video/audio, and qtkit, opal and qtcore. Until then I’ll stick to OSX. Why use an imitation when the original is so much better? GNUStep hasn’t even got a web browser yet. (To be fair I am trying to learn objective-C under OSX mainly so I can develop GNUStep applications) but what the hell? GTK/QT are so STUPID compared to gnustep/obj-c. After using quartz composer how can anyone think gstreamer has a chance in hell of becoming anything decent?
Edited 2011-07-13 11:45 UTC
You should go with Symbian, then, not OSX. Why use a hybrid kernel when there is a true microkernel?
(The OSX kernel is not really “micro” anymore, even though it is derived from Mach.)
The OSX kernel was never a Microkernel nor was the Mach kernel used in NeXTSTEP.
The previous poster listed very high level APIs as OSX’s added value, not the internals of its kernel, micro or otherwise.
I can’t figure out what’s the deal with GNUStep, why has there been SO LITTLE progress in the past 15 years. Probably because they’re wasting time making things like freaking “simple web kit” because they’re implementation of Cocoa is so broken that its “too hard” to port WebKit, so they waste years writing a “simple” version of WebKit, freaking insane. Just fix your Cocoa implementation so that WebKit just compiles.
Anyway, I guess I understand the seemingly slow progress of GNU Hurd, operating systems are hard to write, especially when your starting from a clean slate like HURD.
But on the Cocoa front, have you heard of Cocotron, its a fully compatible implementation of Cocoa that allows you cross compile your apps to OSX, Windows and Linux, http://cocotron.org/
Cocotron is MIT licensed, and it just a few years they have made about a 1000% more progress than GNUStep.
Why use a hybrid kernel when there is a true microkernel?
This is a good question, and I think it is the source (heh) of a lot of confusion here and on many other sites. I think there may be some practical reasons to use a ‘hybrid microkernel’. But without being able to cite actual kernel source code, most discussions are hand waving, and ego arguments.
The Tannenbaum&Torvalds debate is probably one of the most high profile kernel comparison debates in recent years.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/
That’s a nice link, but still no source code 🙂
Here’s a link to the original Tannenbaum vs Linus debate:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html
“I can’t figure out what’s the deal with GNUStep, why has there been SO LITTLE progress in the past 15 years.”
Money
When you say that GNUstep has had a lot of progress the last 15 years, what exactly do you mean?
While I can understand that Webkit is important in order to create a modern browser – that is not the goal and never has been the goal of GNUstep.
The goal for GNUstep is to track Cocoa as close as possible and only deviate when it makes sense. Foundation and AppKit are production ready and are used (maybe not to the extent that I would like to see but, used!) in both commercial applications and opensource.
GNUstep now has a working ObjC2 runtime (with garbage collection) that is more or less equivalent to Apple’s either using GCC 4.x or clang.
There is a UIKit implementation in progress.
There is an implementation of Core(xxxx) libraries going on with steady progress.
There are a lot of things happening.
In terms of code quality I cannot really comment between Cocotron vs GNUstep – I leave that. I did notice that Cocotron claims to have only AppKit for Windows? GNUstep has it for Windows, *nix (X11, Cairo, LibArt).
And I fail to see what the relevance to Hurd is? True, GNUstep is a GNU project and it should be working for GNU Hurd but GNUstep is in no way dependent on GNU Hurd or the other way around.
I want to ran GNU-Emacs with the EtoileOs interface on GNU/Hurd with the Nova MicroHypervisor and IOKit.
What is the status of the kernel itself? Are the devs still starting over constantly with a new microkernel or is Hurd becoming close to something we can call “stable”?
PS. http://www.archhurd.org/ is also a noteworthy Hurd distro.
I have been following Hurd for years and I must say that right now (and for perhaps a year) there seems to be a more focused effort take make it stable and make it work, using gnumach as the kernel.
The chase for a new micro kernel is still on but very much a more academic exercise happening in parallel and in a slow pace from what I can tell.
The GNU Hurd project still suffers from not enough developers to do the work that is needed.
The ambition to port OpenJDK 7 to Hurd (and fixing things in core places as needed) is an excellent way of making it more stable.
Archhurd has proven that DDE is possible to use as a driver layer and while I was skeptical to have drivers in userland, I now see that it is an excellent way of getting drivers with less effort and ok performance. It It is not like the freebsd layer in Haiku (which I think is in privileged kernel land) but the goals are different between the OSes. DDE fits perfectly into Hurd.
Have you recently downloaded a copy? Because it’s not note worthy any more it seems.
I (coincidently) tried to download ArchHurd before reading your post and eventually gave up.
The newest ISO is 9 months out of date (which is a long time in Arch-land) and even that is nearly impossible to get hold of:
* the .torrent file doesn’t exist any more
* and the HTTP mirrors ETA at a 2 day download (bare in mind Debians DVD ISO is ~10x larger yet took < 1.5hrs to download on my connection)
Pity really as in an ideal world I’d have preferred Arch over Debian.
Edited 2011-07-13 10:05 UTC
I did download it some time ago, and it wasn’t bad. When I say “noteworthy” about a Hurd based distro, what I mean is that it boots and is somewhat useable for doing simple stuff without crashing.
9months is not that out of day… the whole point of arch is you install the base and then upgrade from the repositories.
The Archlinux install cds weren’t built but every few months in the past and only recently from what I remember do they provide “nightlies” I have upgraded arch installs that were over a year old and upgraded fine.
I’ve been an Arch user for many years now so I know the whole point of Arch thank you very much.
My point was that as the latest build is already out of date and even that is impossible to get hold of; ArchHurd is clearly missing some TLC lately and thus I would struggle to consider it “note worthy” until some ISOs become available again.
That is unless anyone else can find a working mirror? Because I sure couldn’t
Edited 2011-07-13 19:45 UTC
It’s GNU HURD, what difference would 9 months make?
For the last time, my point was ***I COULD NOT DOWNLOAD THAT ISO***!!
9 months in itself wouldn’t have bothered me because a simple ‘pacman -Suy’ would have fixed any problems there (I regularly use “out of date” Arch install CDs for the same reason).
However if you can’t even download the aforementioned ISO then you’re dead before you’ve even started!
Sorry if I sound ratty, but I’ve said this 3 times now and people are still missing the point.
Edited 2011-07-14 07:03 UTC
I just downloaded the image in less than 10 minutes. I fail to see the problem.
Well would you mind sharing the URL then (as I did ask when suggesting others might find a working mirror that I missed)?
I just went to the main download page and tried the first link:
http://www.archhurd.org/livecd.php?iso=i686-core-2010-09-17
Ahhh. Must have been a glitch in the system when I tried then.
Thank you and I’ll download this tonight.
You see… they were simply holding development back for Duke Nukem Forever being released or pigs flying, whichever came first.
(the real surprise here is that Duke came first).
edit: damn it, I can’t fix the typo in comment title, lets all pretend its to match the typo in article title
Edited 2011-07-13 10:59 UTC
just wiki’d hurd to learn more about it.
In this they also linked to Coyotos OS and this linked to BitC programming language that want to bring the ease of higher level programming to closer hardware interaction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyotos
http://www.bitc-lang.org/
I wonder what how this projects compare to higher level languages trying to solve this in another way.
Like the Pyrix and Cython is to Python.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrex_(programming_language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyotos
BitC isn’t really about programming hardware in a higher level language.
It is about programming an OS in a language that is safe.
while Guido might fly in an all python airplane[1]
I wouldn’t.
BitC really probably falls as far from python on the spectrum of languages as any 2 languages could.
[1] http://www.artima.com/intv/strongweakP.html
As in Quarter Century?
🙂
typo in headline
It’s good to hear a news about a microkernel OS.
GUI installer screenshots:
http://hup.hu/cikkek/20110713/grafikus_telepitot_kapott_a_debian_gn…