Begone Linux, GNU/Hurd Is The Real FOSS Kernel

Nowadays Linux is the king of the FOSS world with BSD sitting off to the side doing it's thing, but there was another kernel that could have taken it's place, GNU/Hurd. The only problem is it arrived a little bit too late, since then it's only continued to fall further and further but it's still being developed.

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#Linux #OpenSource #FOSS #GNU #LinuxDesktop

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[rugbyx]

This is the year of the GNU/Hurd Desktop

[zeyadkenawi]

Hurd is being worked on by some students who want to learn about OS design and I think the leader is a professor that's having fun with this project.

[그냥사람-ef]

"There are nothing more permanent than a temporary solution"

[paladingeorge]

The fact I can sit here and comment on this video while using a free OS with a game running on the side is truly a wonderous thing.

[Roxor]

GNU HURD is the Duke Nukem Forever of operating systems.

[Mr.Finkel]

man if gnu hurd was the main thing instead of linux everyone would've had to deal with RMS, like A LOT, and like all the time. That would have been interesting to see.

[casperes]

Fun fact, XNU (the macOS kernel) is a combination of custom Apple parts, FreeBSD and Mach

[svanhoosen]

Thank you for mentioning Debian GNU/Hurd. I just downloaded it and now playing with it in KVM, just for the hell of it.

[hamobu]

I actually think that it's lucky that Linux beat out Hurd because Torvalds seems to be a better software manager than Stallman.

[OcteractSG]

From what I understand, Torvalds’ original license would be binding, but it would allow a significant amount of debate if he ever needed to litigate it. That would make enforcement a lot more expensive, which was probably prohibitively expensive for Torvalds already even if the license was tightly-worded. Therefore, I think the license was actually a perfect fit because it clearly articulated without hard-to-understand legalese what Torvalds wanted at the time. Basically, it was what it was, and there was/is nothing wrong with that.

[travisSimon]

I once asked RMS about Hurd, and he told me that the main problem was it's Microkernal design. Specifically, he said that debugging errors in a message passing environment was difficult due to a lack of traceability. With a monolith, you get a stack trace to the beginning of time. With a microkernal, you might be able to see the most recent message you were passed.

(pls note that I'm not an OS dev and I asked this like 15 years ago, so exact details may not be 100% precise)

[jamescobban]

Microkernel has obvious advantages for teaching OS development because with the bulk of the functionally being in user space individual students can write their parts without the risk of crashing the system. Personally I first encountered this way back in the 1970s on OS/370. Communications code could run either in user mode or supervisor mode, but you got about 10 percent better performance if your code ran in supervisor mode. The core of both CICS and IMS/DC in particular was called directly from the kernel, and I created a product which similarly ran the most performance critical pieces in supervisor mode. This product supported 20, 000 simultaneous users on a 4-core 5 Mips mainframe. Processors were REALLY slow back then. But everything was thoroughly tested and debugged in user mode before it was moved to supervisor mode.

[vicca]

Based Torvalds wanted even the poorest of persons to have access to Linux.

[capability-snob]

Wow, a well-researched video about the HURD! Well done.

[kennystrawnmusic]

Surprised no one has thought of porting UML to Hurd as a way of providing a shim for supporting additional hardware yet. After all, a different version of the GPL can definitely run in user mode without violating it at the kernel level — you’d get all the benefits of GPLv3 plus all the hardware support of a user-mode device compatibility layer copied verbatim from Linux. Win-win.

[shanent]

Microkernels were ahead of their time, the hadware just wasn't there. Todays systems have many cores, virtualization instructions, IOMMUs etc. so some of those μkernel ideas are getting implemented. DPDK shows that processing packets received directly into userspace performs very well. Since type-1 hypervisors are often μk, any hardware with OS exclusive drivers is automatically supported

[hostgrady]

I don't agree with your assessment that we'd be using Hurd simply if Linux came out later. GNU is a lot stricter so there'd be no firmware and thus no support, I think a BSD probably would be what we use

[tylerdean]

“GNU is the system, and Linux is one of its kernels.” -RMS

[Lampe]

Linux was in the right place at the right time.
It appeared when the tooling to use it was already made and it had no real, ready-to-use competitors.

[esra_erimez]

I liked this wonderfully informative video. May the sentiment analysis algorithm bless it with many views.