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[f-cpu] Related: Something YG may not have HURD ;-)
On Tue, 4 Sep 2001 15:44, you wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2001 whygee@club-internet.fr wrote:
>
> Are there actally people working on Hurd? I haven't heard
> anything for quite a while.
>
The dev list is about as active as that of FCPU. We have about 40% of Debian
distro compiling successfully - mostly smaller apps as we started at the
small end. This is all compatibility stuff. The big improvement will be when
applications are written specifically to take advantage of HURDs many new
features and capbilities. We have X, but not a lot of X applications (no
Gnome or KDE which may or may not be a bad thing depending on your
perspective ;-). HURD is not optimised. ie: it is slooooow. That is
considered less important than getting the thing working at present. I'm sure
this list can appreciate that.
Current estimates for Hurd being reasonably mainstream usable are about a
year down to the stable release of Debian/Woody. I believe the latter
requires 80% of the Debian source archive to be compiled.
The big missing part is a pthreads implimentation which means everything has
to be ported to cthreads for the moment. This is being worked on and seems to
be 95% there. There ate one or two other show-stoppers but no more than that.
The mainstream of us testers are on Mach which is based on Linux 2.0 drivers.
Some hackers have been using the OSkit microkernel with some sort of Mach
component to provide something OSkit lacks. OSit has newer drivers (based on
2.2 [2.4??] linux kernel) Something called L4 also gets discussed
occasionally when kernels come up.
You can get the Kernel-Cousin HURD list summary off Linux Today (or, I
assume, other news portals) every week or so.
Here is the most recent monthly Hurd Orientation email:
########################################################
Welcome to the Hurd
===================
Welcome to the Hurd. This email is automatically sent at the begining
of each month to the help-hurd@gnu.org and debian-hurd@lists.debian.org
mailing lists. This message is intended for a quick orientation to new
users.
What is the Hurd?
-----------------
The Hurd is GNU's Multiserver Microkernel operating system. It is
designed with the intention of fixing many of the flaws in *nix. What
are these flaws? The arbitrary limits that it imposes on the user:
there is not a whole lot that a user can do without special privileges.
Consider an NFS filesystem. Only root can mount this on a traditional
*nix system. Why is this? It is not that NFS accesses anything
dangerous, at least, it is no more dangerous than ftp. However, as a
portion of the NFS code lives in the kernel, this presents a potential
security problem. In the Hurd, a user can transparently mount a NFS
filesystem directly into their home directory without affecting the
security of the system as a whole. And this is only the tip of the
iceberg.
Getting Started
---------------
Installation Guides can be found at the following locations:
http://web.walfield.org/papers/hurd-installation-guide/
http://www.pick.ucam.org/~mcv21/hurd.html
You can find out about ISO images at:
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-cd
They come with a modified version of the Debian boot floppies making
installation relatively simple.
GNU Mach uses the drivers found in the Linux 2.0.x kernel. Note, there
is no support for PCMCIA. Here is a HCL:
http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/hacking/hurd/hurd-hardware.html
Mailing Lists:
- bug-hurd@gnu.org: Hurd and Mach development.
- help-hurd@gnu.org: General Hurd questions.
- web-hurd@gnu.org: Maintenance of the hurd webpages at
http://hurd.gnu.org.
- debian-hurd@lists.debian.org: All things related to Debian GNU/Hurd
(especially porting issues).
Subscribe in the usual fashion.
The Hurd FAQ:
http://web.walfield.org/papers/hurd-faq/
Contributions
-------------
A common question is: how can I contribute? There are many tasks that
need to be done:
- Help update the web pages at hurd.gnu.org. Contact
web-hurd@gnu.org.
- Write documentation.
- Port applications. Contact debian-hurd@lists.debian.org. Look at
http://people.debian.org/~jbailey/turtle/group/Debian/index.html
- Write code. Contact bug-hurd@gnu.org. Look at:
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-devel-tasks, <hurd>/tasks
and <hurd>/TODO
- Send feedback. This is, of course, the most important task of all:
Help us help others.
Happy Hacking.
#######################################################
Hope this is useful / interesting.
Cheers, Glenn.
BTW (WOT): a more thorough description of Universe A is now at:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~glenalec/lit/Universe A.html
Some people seemed interested, thats all :-)
--------------------------------------------------------
Glenn Alexander - The man with no surname and a silly hat.
(B.Teach, B.Ed Major IT Education, University of Wollongong Australia)
(Now avaliable in China!)
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~glenalec (last update: 2001.07.29)
I use GNU/Linux: http://www.gnu.org / http://www.linux.org
from Debian: http://www.debian.org
and KDE : http://www.kde.org
--------------------------------------------------------
Fight software piracy. Use GNU! [ http://www.gnu.org ]
--------------------------------------------------------
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