Quarter of the Hurd 2023-Q4 | Hacker News Reader

Quarter of the Hurd 2023-Q4

gnu.org

20 pointsjlpcsl10 comments

GNU Hurd has been in development for more than 30 years, long enough to see drastic changes in the computing industry (e.g. the shift to web and mobile). At this point, I do wonder whether it is more of a public art project than a viable technology, akin to Dwarf Fortress.

https://xkcd.com/1508/

The project's also been running for so long that its hardware requirements have slid from "yes, you can install and boot Hurd on your computer" to "well, okay, maybe if you have an older PC" to "we recommend running Hurd in a VM".

(To back this up: Hurd currently only supports the 32-bit x86 architecture, can only use a single CPU core, and is limited to 1 GB or so of RAM. It also lacks support for USB, PCIe, or anything dependent on them.)

>(To back this up: Hurd currently only supports the 32-bit x86 architecture, can only use a single CPU core, and is limited to 1 GB or so of RAM. It also lacks support for USB, PCIe, or anything dependent on them.)

Wow. I was aware of Hurd and that it's perpetually not ready for real-world use, but I didn't realise it was that far behind. Sounds like even hobby projects e.g. the likes of SerenityOS have leapfrogged it.

Let me add some more details. The Hurd runs really well on 32-bit x86 (Intel only). I'm running it on an IBM T43 with 1.5 GB of RAM. It can use 4GB of RAM. My T43 runs i3, emacs, netsurf, and I use that machine to edit the Hurd wiki. It works just fine.

There are people running the Hurd on a T410 (10 year old laptop), though it is a little wonky to install. I'm trying to install it currently, and I am having issues getting it to boot. I'll blog about it once I get it working at https://gnucode.me

There is a working X86_64 bit port of the Hurd. As far as I know, the 64-bit version can use much more RAM, but I do not know for sure. The 64-bit version still needs some fixing, because for some reason it cannot properly build packages. Not sure why. 65% of the Debian packages work on the Hurd. That's not too bad.

Also we just ported Rust. We have a slowly working SMP for 32-bit. It's actually faster to use non-SMP at the moment. :(

Am I biased? Yes. I wrote this qoth.

> It can use 4GB of RAM.

The FAQ says it's limited to either "830 MiB" or "1.7 GiB", depending on whether you go by the title or the text of the page. If that's out of date, you should probably update it. :)

https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/ram_limit.html

> There is a working X86_64 bit port of the Hurd. [...] The 64-bit version still needs some fixing, because for some reason it cannot properly build packages.

That doesn't sound like it's quite "working" yet, then -- especially if, as some of the mailing list posts suggest, it's crashing randomly during builds. Good to hear that's being worked on, though; the writing is clearly on the wall for i386.

SerenityOS is an interesting beast. It was originally x86 only ( 32 bit ), was ported to x86-64, has already dropped support for 32 bit as “legacy”, is being ported to ARM and RISC-V, and it has never even really run on real hardware yet.

It is in a race with ReactOS and losing.

Is a kernel (or, more precisely, I think a kernel replacement).

Kernels have not changed that much. Android devices use the Linux kernel which is a similar age. Apple uses the XNU kernel which is only a few years younger.

I think it is worth asking whether something that has failed to gain traction or reach after so long is ever going to be practical to use.

I'm not sure that's accurate. Recent pixel devices are using linux 5.1x (2021) and google is apparently thinking of upgrading them to 6.1 (2022). I'm pretty sure Apple is using a kernel that's at most 2-3 years old since that's when apple silicon was released.

At this point hurd only supports hardware that doesn't really exist outside of VMs and very old computers that haven't been sold in the last decade or so.

By that metric, FreeBSD has been around since the 70’s.

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