GNU Hurd/ news/ 2011-q2-ps

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A quarter of the Hurd, Q2 of 2011, PS: GNU Hurd Truths and Myths.

After our last Quarter of the Hurd, Q2 of 2011 has been picked up by a bunch of news sites, blogs, and so on, discussions and speculations have been running all over the net:

We are happy to see that there is considerable interest in the Hurd; but we also saw some misunderstandings, false rumors, and outdated information floating around. Thus we will try to clarify the situation regarding some of the more common misunderstandings.

  • Debian GNU/Hurd strives to become an official Debian port: The Debian GNU/Hurd team is working hard to prepare a technology preview/release candidate for the next Debian release (Wheezy), to eventually become an official port alongside GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD -- but we don't know yet whether we will make it. This is also the understanding of (for example) Debian's spokesperson About Debian, The Hurd and Linux or in short: Yes, we will still have a Linux kernel, Alexander "Tolimar" Reichle-Schmehl, 2011-07-15. There is still substantial work necessary to indeed become a release candidate. If you want to help, please see our contributing page and the to do list maintained on http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/Hurd. We'd be happy to have you on board!

  • Java support for GNU Hurd is nearby: Jérémie Koenig is working on making a versatile Java programming environment available on GNU/Hurd as part of his Google Summer of Code project, focusing on OpenJDK 7. Experimental packages are already available. Also, Java support in GCC (via GCJ/ECJ) has been available before, which Jérémie also improved.

  • GNU Hurd supports X.Org, though a bit unstable: X support has been present for ages (anyone remember 1998's XFree86?), and X.Org also has been supported for a long time (for example, GNU Hurd support is explicitly mentioned in the X.Org 7.2 release announcement). It is true though that many modern graphic card drivers don't work anymore, as they require DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support, so often only VESA is available. Also, X on the Hurd is somewhat unstable.

  • GNU Hurd has weaker device driver support than the Linux kernel: Most of the drivers we use today were imported from Linux 2.0 series. For network cards, Linux 2.6.29 drivers are available through DDE -- however, this is not fully integrated yet, so using these drivers needs manual setup for now (guide). Support for other driver types is also possible with DDE in principle, but it requires some not-trivial work for each additional class of drivers, so this can take some time to become available. (An additional benefit provided by DDE is that the device drivers run as regular user-space processes -- unlike the old drivers we were using so far, which are part of the underlying GNU Mach microkernel.)

  • The Hurd has SMP, but needs support for new chipsets: Both GNU Mach (the microkernel used by the Hurd), and the Hurd servers themselves come with SMP support. However, GNU Mach misses drivers for modern SMP chipsets, and there are also some SMP-related bugs in the implementation, so further work is needed for the Hurd to take advantage of multicore processors.

  • Installation can still be challenging: Please take notice of the README file -- just like with any software in development, there are some known pitfalls to avoid. (Or better yet, help to fix.) :-) Alternatively, you can simply use the the preinstalled image in QEMU/KVM/VirtualBox/...

  • GNU Hurd is not the same as GNU/Hurd: The GNU project set out in 1983 to create a complete free operating system. When a distribution such as Debian combines their GNU-based userland with the GNU kernel (named GNU Hurd), the result is more or less a full GNU system. However, such third-party distributions are distinct from what an official complete GNU system release would be; and thus we often call them GNU/Hurd for clarity, similar to GNU/Linux or GNU/kFreeBSD.

  • Performance: The benchmarks conducted by Phoronix (as reported by Test Driving GNU Hurd, With Benchmarks Against Linux, Phoronix, Michael Larabel, 2011-07-18) (Phoronix/Michael: thanks for doing these!) attest very good performance to the Hurd. Keep in mind though that these benchmarks were almost completely CPU-bound, so they essentially just confirm that we don't do anything stupid regarding CPU initialization (cache setup, etc.). The results would be different for benchmarks that actually exercise the operating system functionality more. The fact that the tests were performed in a virtualized environment, might also have helped the results, for example by mitigating the effects of our unoptimized I/O paths -- which are currently the major bottleneck in most situations. Nevertheless, these results are a hint that the extra IPC required in microkernel systems doesn't necessarily hamper performance quite as much as often believed. We are glad to see such solid benchmarks help dispel some of the myths around the Hurd and other microkernel-based systems.

  • Given the available manpower, the progress is very good: Over the past decade, there were seldom more than half a dozen developers at any given time hacking on the Hurd, in their spare time -- not hundreds of paid developers like Linux has nowadays. Considering this, the progress made is quite encouraging with the system being pretty usable for many day-to-day tasks now. It is generally understood that the ambitious architecture of the Hurd requires a lot of effort to get it working at all, but the recent progress shows that once the foundations are in place, the Hurd design indeed allows the developers to be very productive. To see the progress over the last few years, you can have a look at our news archive. If you're interested, you can find various ways of contributing. We'd be happy to see you join in, because for the Hurd, every single helping hand makes a big difference!