GNU / Hurd

Software & Operating Systems
1

Hi

I have a presentation tomorrow about the Hurd.

The presentation is in place but I want to do a short demo, showing of Hurt in a VM
My VM is ready but I don’t know what to show. I am using Debian GNU/Hurt and I can’t finde a big difference to normal Debian Linux

Is there something I can do that would not work on Debian Linux.
What I thought first was killing a task and showing of the stability of the Hurt. But killing random tasks would not instantly kill Debian. And I am not sure if this is even totally true.

How can I show Hurd or the diffrence from Hurd to all UNIX Systems?

Thanks for a answer

Janick

2

do the whole presentation showing jails and boot environments, and the power of its native hypervisor, and then show off the network performance and coherency in the firewall and trunking stuff.

then punk everyone by screenfetching and showing its just freebsd.

2 Likes
3

The main difference between HURD and Linux on a Debian system is that HURD currently does not have any albums released as kernel modules.

Linux, however, does offer netcat’s 2014 Cycles Per Instruction album as a loadable module.

4

Yeah but how can I show that? I can tell them about these things but my problem I want to show something in the terminal. something special from the hurd

5

That would be fun but not the point of my presentation unfortunately.

6

The point I was making is that HURD is just a kernel, and there’s literally nothing it can do that linux doesn’t already except for running a worse license.

It’s not meaningfully different from a practical perspective, so I’d focus on the structural or symbolic.

1 Like
7

Personally, I think a great thing to demo would have been extending the kernel live in userspace with non-C code. But since your presentation is tomorrow…

What you could do is demo that, in its current state, Hurd is as good as Linux — for most of the the stuff that matters, at least. If you don’t have enough time to develop a good demo showing the advantages of Hurd, show how it can be used as a drop-in replacement for Linux instead. Focus on what works. Split-screen, with Hurd on one side and Linux on the other. Simultaneous executions of commands (and usage of GUI apps) with outputs showing that the two behave the same. Optional timer in the middle if there are any performance issues worth noting.

The thing that Hurd needs is to attract more regular developers/contributors. Fence-sitting developers will be more likely to give it a try if they can see that GNU/Hurd will do all the essential things that they currently get from GNU/Linux. Show them a non-crippled GNU/Hurd workstation that could be used as a daily driver and you might help grow the user base.

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8

not sure practical testing would bear that out

9

And there’s the rub… Hurd needs to get to ‘Minimum Viable Product’ status before it has any hope of (re-)gaining momentum and ‘taking off’ in any meaningful way. If folks aren’t focused on reaching and demonstrating MVP status, then I’m not sure what the point is.

10

i’m totally fine with hurd dying tbh

lgpl is too much gpl if we’re being honest and we have other systems for things that need something else.

functionally makes zero difference unless they have a practical leg up

which as far as I can tell they dont

1 Like
11

Thank you all

I probably wanted more then there is to show. Now I know

Thanks

12

Surprised Hurd supports networking in a VM yet.

The big difference with between debian and hurd outside of RMS issues is that Debian actually has hardware support.

edit:
conceptually, hurd is an extreme microkernel variant from memory.

It’s one of those academic type projects that was meant to prove Linux was obsolete back in the 90s, however Linux actually shipped practical, working code.

HURD still hasn’t.

1 Like
13

Thank you all.

The Presentation was a total success.

The community here is still the best !!!

3 Likes
14

no problem man

what angle did you end up going with out of curiosity?

15

So there where about 6 teams all showing and explaining a OS. We just showed that is so similar to Linux but as its GNU it is not Unix so that was cool. I could show that a crashed server just reboots the specific server and dose not crash the system.

I like the Hurd as an Idea but it is dead. There is no point for this OS anymore. The situation might have been different in the 90ies but now everything is more or less stable

2 Likes
16

linux isn’t unix either

the hurd might actually be closer to some *nix kernels than linux actually.

17

Well done on the presentation! as it’s done, you may want to close the thread; unless you still want to talk about Hurd.

18

Pretty much.

macOS is ironically one of the last standing of the unix derivatives and both macOS and Nextstep were mach microkernels and had more in common with hurd than linux as a kernel does :smiley: