A month of the Hurd: first DDE driver, libpciaccess upstream, Fosdem results and GSoC meetings again. Details.
This month saw the first running and testable DDE driver by Zheng Da, with which he begins to reap the benefits of porting DDE to Hurd, since DDE allows to use current Linux drivers for Mach and L4.
Also Samuel Thibault pushed libpciaccess to Xorg which adds support in the Xserver (x86) “for OSes that do not have a PCI interface, tinkering with I/O ports, and makes use of it on GNU/Hurd.”
Additionally we saw the talks on the Hurd in the Alt-OS devroom at Fosdem: Why is Anyone Still Working on the GNU Hurd? and Porting KGI graphics drivers from Linux to GNU Hurd.
In Mikels words:
The room was full and people were "standing-up" for the talk. Some people couldn't even enter the room (+20?).
Antrik made a good job. Was nice for the crowd to see Hurd running X, slow but working.
The unique problem might have been the short time available. The machine needed to be fsck-ed losing some time, which could have been be used at the end for Q&A which was quite interesting.
Sadly we couldn't yet upload notes from the talks - as soon as these are availble, you should get notice here. Also they should be linked on the Fosdem pages we linked to above.
And it is time for the Google Summer of Code again, so we started our weekly GSoC IRC meetings in which we coordinate the GSoC projects. 2008 the GNU Hurd had 5 successful projects, 2009 saw another one, and we hope to make it 5 projects again this year. The last few years brought libchannel, lisp bindings, dtrace, nsmux, network virtualization (which led to the DDE drivers), procfs and unionmount, and we have dozens of ideas for innovative projects this year.
So if you're interested in working on the GNU Hurd, or want to help with coordinating (or simply want to be up to date), please come and join in (currently via IRC every Wednesday at 11:00 UTC). Also we'd be glad to have more eyes on polishing ?organization application.
A month of the Hurd: Arch Hurd, FOSDEM preparations and a thesis on mobile Hurd objects. Details.
This month, we saw the first booting version of an Arch Hurd system, which seconds the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution that already provides two third of the Debian software archive compiled for GNU/Hurd.
Nine Hurd developers will meet at FOSDEM 2010 on February 6th and 7th in Bruxelles, Belgium. On Sunday, Olaf will be giving two presentations in the Alt-OS Developer Room: Why is Anyone Still Working on the GNU Hurd? (10:30), and Porting KGI graphics drivers from Linux to GNU Hurd (13:00). The day before, on Saturday, Bas will be giving a talk about Iris, his new kernel (18:00, Embedded Developer Room).
Carl Fredrik Hammar finished and presented his thesis Generalizing mobility for the Hurd and passed with distinction. Congratulations! Its abstract reads:
The GNU Hurd features mobile objects in its implementation of filesystem backing stores. This thesis investigates the limitations and security concerns these objects present, and how they can be overcome. This is done in preparation for new applications that feature mobile code and mobile objects. In addition, one such application is studied and implemented, in which mobile code is used to make the
ioctlsystem call more extensible.So, when are YOU going to do a thesis, or another project on a GNU/Hurd-related topic? Contact us if you are interested!
A month of the Hurd: official Xen domU support, DDE, porting, and FOSDEM 2010. Details.
This month Samuel Thibault merged his development branch into GNU Mach's master branch -- meaning that his GNU Mach Xen domU port is now part of the official sources. Only the microkernel (GNU Mach) needed to be extended, and no changes were needed in the Hurd, or glibc code bases. He had started this port in 2007 already, but it has been in heavy use over the last two years already, so merging it into the main source bases was long overdue.
He also got the necessary Xen patches committed into Xen's unstable branch, so that from Xen's 4.0 release on you'll be able to boot GNU/Hurd systems using
pv-grub, without the need to prepare a special bootstrap image (like an initrd).Of course, running GNU/Hurd systems in other virtualization environments is possible too, but the Xen domU approach offers superior performance compared to QEMU's machine emulation, for example.
Samuel also spent some time on adding code for detecting invalid (duplicate) port deallocations, and started fixing these, as well as he fulfilled his usual share of miscellaneous bug fixing.
The DDE port of Zheng Da now passes the first tests, bringing us the first steps towards updated device drivers -- and much lower overhead for maintaining them.
Now that the Debian GNU/Hurd build stats are again hosted on the master Debian build machine, Debian developers see their packages' build failures more prominently, and quite a few started to fix their packages.
Thus, thanks to the porting work of mainly Emilio Pozuelo Monfort and Pino Toscano, users of the Hurd can get many more packages directly via the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution. Thanks to their and the other porters' relentless work, the percentage of available Debian packages has reached 66%, rising. For a specific example, they ported many GNOME packages, so that the
gnome-coremetapackage is installable again. Please test these and report back.Thomas Schwinge started the planning for a GNU Hurd folks meeting at FOSDEM on February 6th/7th 2010 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Guillem Jover jumped in and started fixing GNU Mach build warnings -- meaning that Thomas Schwinge's evil plan finally worked out, when he enabled
-Wallin an October 2006 commit:+# Yes, this makes the eyes hurt. But perhaps someone will finally take care of +# all that scruffy Mach code... Also see <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?5726>. +AM_CFLAGS += \ + -Wall
The GNU Hurd team wishes a pleasant Year 2010 to everyone!
A month of the Hurd: initial work on network device drivers in user space, GRUB 2. Details.
This month Zheng Da, our former Google Summer of Code student working on network virtualization and some related topics, published the code for the pcnet32 device driver that he had modified to run as a user-space process instead of inside the kernel, and posted some preliminary performance benchmark results. The test results are mostly on par with the in-kernel driver, so they show that moving the lower-layer parts of the networking stack, the device drivers themselves, into user space can be done without losing (much) performance. Given this encouraging start, work is going on to explore whether the Device Driver Environment that has been created for L4-based systems can be used for providing GNU/Hurd systems with device drivers that (a) are more recent than our current ones, (b) support classes of devices that we don't support so far, and (c) are running as (possibly separate, fault-isolated) user-space processes.
Thanks to Samuel Thibault, the latest Debian GRUB 2 package (1.97+20091130-1) supports native installation from GNU/Hurd itself -- booting GNU/Hurd systems with GRUB has always been working, but until now it wasn't possible to install GRUB from a GNU/Hurd system. GNU GRUB has originally been written for booting GNU/Hurd systems, so this step completes its original purpose.
Samuel also continued to work on preparing the Xen branch of GNU Mach for being merged with the mainline code, and he fixed a kernel panic in the kernel's floating point support code.
A month of the Hurd: new installation CDs, further Git migration, porting. Details.
This month Philip Charles created a new installation CD, the L series, for the Hurd, which brings us a big step towards installing the Hurd from the Hurd (without the need of a Linux-based installer). If you enjoy testing stuff, please give it a try.
On the same front, Michael Banck uploaded a new version of crosshurd that makes it again possible to use this package for creating a GNU/Hurd system image directly from Debian unstable packages.
Also, Thomas Schwinge migrated Sergiu Ivanov's nsmux, Flávio Cruz' cl-hurd (clisp bindings), and Carl Fredrik Hammar libchannel repositories into our new incubator Git repository, making them easier to access for other contributors.
Our bunch of porters continued to make further Debian packages usable on GNU/Hurd: Pino Toscano worked on a lot of packages, and Wesley W. Terpstra made mlton build -- together with Samuel Thibault, who first had to enhance GNU Mach to support allocating more than 1 GiB of RAM to one user-space process, which mlton needs.
On the go, Samuel also fixed a number of other bugs here and there, for example together with Eric Blake and Roland McGrath hashed out a difficile issue in the filesystem servers regarding POSIX conformance and system stability.
A month of the Hurd: Successful Google Summer of Code project: unionmount. Details.
This month saw the successful completion of the Google Summer of Code 2009, for which Sergiu Ivanov created a unionmount translator. His work allows you to simply union one directory or translator into another one, so you see the files of both of them side by side.
He was mentored by Olaf Buddenhagen and both are now working on polishing the code and extending the namespace based translator selection (nsmux) which allows you to read a node with a selected translator by simply appending
,,<translator>to its name.That aside, we saw the usual steady rate of enhancement discussions, as well as bugs getting fixed: X server crashing, preventing that GCC versions after 4.2 optimize too much, etc.
A month of the Hurd: hurd Debian package, union mount translator, bug fixes, and a job opening. Details.
Samuel Thibault uploaded a new version of the hurd Debian package which improves system stability by fixing a long-standing bug in the exec server that had randomly made it hang, inhibiting the creation of new processes.
Sergiu Ivanov implemented most of the functionality of the union mount translator which allows combining the filesystem trees exported by several translators with the filesystem tree of the underlying node (in contrast to a pure unionfs, which won't do that). The patches are currently undergoing testing and review on the bug-hurd mailing list. This work is being done as a Google Summer of Code project, and we're happy to tell that Sergiu successfully passed the project's midterm evaluation.
Also, Zheng Da fixed a bug in GNU Mach's BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) implementation and contributed a number of fixes and improvements for rpctrace which should help further debugging.
Aside from looking for new contributors all the time, here is another job opening that doesn't require specific Hurd knowledge: we're seeking someone interested in writing a regression test suite for Hurd components.
A month of the Hurd: Git migration, stand-alone libpthread and updated status. Details.
This month Thomas Schwinge finished migrating the main Hurd, GNU Mach, MIG, libpthread and unionfs to Git. You can find the new repositories at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/.
Also, he made libpthread buildable stand-alone by separating its build system from the Hurd's.
Additionally, Olaf Buddenhagen wrote a usability report about his experience with the GNU Hurd for everyday work.
Sergiu Ivanov will be working on unionmount translators during the Google Summer of Code 2009.
The application phase for the Google Summer of Code 2009 has already started. Please see our page about the GSoC for details of how to apply for your favorite Hurd project.
Neal Walfield has submitted a paper to EuroSys 2009 describing how resource management is done in viengoos:
Viengoos: A Framework for Stakeholder-Directed Resource Allocation.
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Samuel Thibault has implemented support for the PAE feature offered by modern x86 processors. This largely faciliates the deployment of GNU/Hurd systems running as a Xen domU on top of a standard Debian GNU/Linux Xen dom0, for example.
All five students who worked on the Hurd during the Google Summer of Code 2008 succeeded in their projects. For more information please see the community/gsoc page. Congratulations to both students and mentors!
The GNU Hurd project has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2008! If you are a student and looking for a job during the summer, take a look at our project ideas list--here's your chance to help improving the GNU Hurd including mentoring from our side and being paid compensation from Google's!
The application deadline has been extended to Monday, 2008-04-07, so there's more time for you students to hand in your Hurd applications.
A number of GNU Hurd developers will again (as already in the previous years) meet at the time of the FOSDEM 2008, which will take place from 2008-02-23 to 24 in Brussels, Belgium.
The page about FOSDEM 2008 has some details. Contact us if you are interested in meeting with us.
Stefan Siegl added support for IPv6 networking to the pfinet translator.
This year the GNU Hurd had again been assigned one slot within the Google Summer of Code program, which was assigned to the task design and implement libchannel, a library for streams. Carl Fredrik Hammar has been working on this task and recently posted a summary about the successful work he had been doing, but also gave an outline about how he intends to continue improving and extending it.
The GNU Hurd project will participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, under the aegis of the GNU project.
The following is a list of items you might want to work on. If you want to modify these task proposals or have your own ideas on what to work, then please don't hesitate to contact us on the bug-hurd mailing list or the #hurd IRC channel.
- Design and implement libchannel, a library for streams.
- Rewrite pfinet, our interface to the IPv4 world; create a pfinet6 to interface to the IPv6 world.
- Make GNU Mach use more up to date device drivers.
- Design and implement a sound system.
- Introduce the world of the Andrew File System (AFS) to the Hurd.
- Work on enhancing our NFS client and NFSd.
- Implement support for Logical Volume Management (LVM).
Please see the page GNU guidelines for Summer of Code projects about how to make an application and Summer of Code project ideas list for a list of tasks for various GNU projects and information about about how to submit your own ideas for tasks.
Neal Walfield and Marcus Brinkmann have written and submitted for publication A Critique of the GNU Hurd Multi-server Operating System and a position paper Improving Usability via Access Decomposition and Policy Refinement. Please follow the two preceding links to see the complete announcements. The authors welcome comments and discussion which may be directed to the <bug-hurd@gnu.org> mailing list for the Critique and to the <l4-hurd@gnu.org> mailing list for the position paper.
The abstract of the Critique:
The GNU Hurd's design was motivated by a desire to rectify a number of observed shortcomings in Unix. Foremost among these is that many policies that limit users exist simply as remnants of the design of the system's mechanisms and their implementation. To increase extensibility and integration, the Hurd adopts an object-based architecture and defines interfaces, which, in particular those for the composition of and access to name spaces, are virtualizable.
This paper is first a presentation of the Hurd's design goals and a characterization of its architecture primarily as it represents a departure from Unix's. We then critique the architecture and assess it in terms of the user environment of today focusing on security. Then follows an evaluation of Mach, the microkernel on which the Hurd is built, emphasizing the design constraints which Mach imposes as well as a number of deficiencies its design presents for multi-server like systems. Finally, we reflect on the properties such a system appears to require.
The abstract of the position paper:
Commodity operating systems fail to meet the security, resource management and integration expectations of users. We propose a unified solution based on a capability framework as it supports fine grained objects, straightforward access propagation and virtualizable interfaces and explore how to improve resource use via access decomposition and policy refinement with minimum interposition. We argue that only a small static number of scheduling policies are needed in practice and advocate hierarchical policy specification and central realization.
A number of GNU Hurd developers will again (as already in the previous years) meet at the time of the FOSDEM 2007, which will take place from 2007-02-24 to 25 in Brussels, Belgium. This wiki page has some details. Contact us if you are interested in meeting with us.
The GNU Hurd project will participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, under the aegis of the GNU project.
The following is a list of items you might want to work on. If you want to modify or extend these tasks or have your own ideas what to work on, please feel invited to contact us on the bug-hurd mailing list or the #hurd IRC channel.
- Make GNU Mach use more up to date device drivers.
- Work on GNU Mach's IPC / VM system.
- Design and implement a sound system.
- Transition the Hurd libraries and servers from cthreads to pthreads.
- Find and implement a reasonable way to make the Hurd servers use syslog.
- Design and implement libchannel, a library for streams.
- Rewrite pfinet, our interface to the IPv4 world.
- Implement and make the Hurd properly use extended attributes.
- Design / implement / enhance support for the...
Please see the page GNU guidelines for Summer of Code projects about how to make an application and Summer of Code project ideas list for a list of tasks for various GNU projects and information about about how to submit your own ideas for tasks.
Material from the Operating System topic during the Libre Software Meeting which took place this summer is available online. Included are slides and recordings of talks by Marcus Brinkmann and Neal Walfield about the Hurd/L4 port.
Marcus Brinkmann added a small web page describing the ongoing developments on the Hurd-to-L4 port.
Added a link to Patrick Strasser's the Hurd Source Code Cross Reference in all the "Source code" sections.
GNU/LinuxTag 2003 is now over and since there was a talk given about the Hurd, a demo GNU/Hurd machine running and the sale of Hurd t-shirts, Wolfgang Jährling decided to write a short summary of what happened there. Many thanks to Wolfgang Jährling, Volker Dormeyer and Michael Banck!
The tarball for Debian GNU/Hurd that Marcus Brinkmann made over the years has been discontinued in favour of Jeff Bailey's crosshurd package. To install Debian GNU/Hurd from now on, this package should be used. Another Debian system is required to be installed on the same machine. The GNU/Hurd installation guide has not been updated yet.
The GNU/Hurd User's Guide is now accessible through the Documentation section of the Hurd web pages.
Gaël Le Mignot, president of HurdFr, presented the GNU Hurd on 22 November 2002 at EpX in Paris. English slides and French slides of the talk are also available.
For one month now, the pthread implementation by Neal Walfield is part of the Hurd CVS source tree, and has been used to compile more software for the Debian GNU/Hurd archive. The lack of a POSIX compatible thread library (the Hurd was based on the cthread implementation that originally accompanied Mach) was a show stopper, and we are happy about the possibility to not only compile more applications, but also to start the work on migrating the Hurd source code to pthreads.
The Toronto Hurd Users Group meets again: The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club will be hosting talks on the GNU Hurd on October 26 by Marcus Brinkmann and Neal Walfield. There will also be a GnuPG keysigning before Marcus's talk. Please email Ryan Golbeck your GnuPG key so he can get everyone setup.
Marcus will talk about the Hurd interfaces. Neal will talk about about A GNU Approach to Virtual Memory Management in a Multiserver Operating System
Date: 26 Oct 2002
Time: 1330 (1:30pm EST) and 1500 (3:00pm EST)
Place: University of Waterloo, Math and Computers building, room MC 2066
More information can be found at UW CS Club website and at thug@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann speaks about the GNU Hurd at "Reflections | Projections 2002", the National Student ACM Conference at the University of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. The conference is held on October 18-20.
A new article about the authentication server has been added to the web pages. It resembles the talk about the same topic which was given at the Libre Software Meeting, therefore the target audience is mostly programmers which want to learn about the details of authentication in the Hurd.
The Hurd sources have stabilized again after a short period in which some of the interfaces were changed to prepare support of long files. All relevant filesystem and I/O interfaces have been modified to use 64 bit even on 32 bit systems.
In light of the small and patient user base, we decided to drop backwards compatibility and replace the interfaces instead extending them. This means that the binaries of the Hurd, the C library, and some other programs need to be replaced manually, all at the same time, followed by a reboot.
A detailed step-by-step procedure how to upgrade Debian GNU/Hurd is available on the Debian web site.
People not using a binary distribution need to do a full manual bootstrap. It is recommended to treat this as a cross-compilation case.
Various developers of the Hurd and people interested in it will meet at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux on July 9-13. Neal Walfield, who is working on porting the Hurd to the L4 microkernel, will give a presentation about L4, the people from HurdFr will give an introduction to the Hurd, and another presentation about the Hurd will be given by Marcus Brinkmann. There might be additional talks about the Hurd and related topics.
We are pleased to announce version 1.3 of the GNU distribution of the Mach kernel, featuring advanced boot script support, support for large disks (>= 10GB) and an improved console.
This distribution is only for x86 PC machines. Volunteers interested in ports to other architectures are eagerly sought.
More information about GNU Mach 1.3 is available on the GNU Mach web page.
Finally, the transition from the stdio-based GLibC Application Binary Interface (ABI) to the libio-based GLibC ABI has been completed. The Debian GNU/Hurd binary distribution has resumed building packages again, and everything should be back to normal. Note that we have also switched to GCC 3.1 as our default compiler. Thanks to everyone who helped in making all this possible, and our apologize for any inconvenience we have caused you.
The "Linux and Unix User Group Heilbronn" (in Germany) is organizing a Debian GNU/Hurd installation party at 25 May 2002. In addition to that, Wolfgang Jährling will give a talk about usage of GNU/Hurd, common problems found in porting programs to GNU/Hurd and programming of extensions for the Hurd. It is a public event, so everyone is free to show up and participate.
We are currently finishing the transition from a stdio-based GNU C Library (glibc) to a libio-based one. This is the result of about five months of work we put into getting the system ready and, of course, the work that the glibc developers did to make glibc what it is.
This change will have various advantages, for example libio has been tested more extensively, as it is also used by most GNU/Linux systems for some time now. However, it also means a change in the Application Binary Interface (ABI) of glibc, thus you will need to reinstall an existing Debian GNU/Hurd system. Upgrading has not been tested at all, so better do not expect it to work. Also note that you will need to get some of the Debian packages from alpha.gnu.org. Please read the recent mailing list archives for details.
Important Note: As another temporary complication, the current installation tarball is available at a different place than usual.
Added the Hurd Hacking Guide to the documentation section. Thanks to Wolfgang Jährling for providing this introduction into GNU/Hurd and Mach programming!
We are pleased to announce version 1.3 of the GNU distribution of the Mach 3.0 interface generator `MIG'. It may be found in the file http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mig/mig-1.3.tar.gz (about 145 KB compressed).
Diffs from version 1.2 are in http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mig/mig-1.2-1.3.diff.gz (about 6 KB compressed, 15 KB uncompressed). Relative to version 1.2, version 1.3 contains only some minor fixes.
You need this tool to compile the GNU Mach and Hurd distributions, and to compile GNU libc for the Hurd.
Bug reports relating to this distribution should be sent to bug-hurd@gnu.org. Requests for assistance should be made on help-hurd@gnu.org.
The md5sum checksum for this distibution is:
45c2b7456727d81dbd75f7152f8136fd mig-1.3.tar.gz
There is a new mailing list called Hurd-devel-readers. It is the read-only version of Hurd-devel.
Hurd-devel is a mailing list for detailed discussions of design and implementation issues in the GNU Hurd; it is an internal low-volume list restricted to the core developers of the Hurd. While the web-based archive of Hurd-devel has always been public, the new mailing list Hurd-devel-readers provides a convenient way to follow the discussion of the Hurd experts.
If you are a recipient of Hurd-devel-readers and want to follow up on the discussion, please reply to the Bug-hurd mailing list.
Pro-Linux has published a GNU/Hurd status report (in German). They will infrequently publish updates in the future.
The Toronto Hurd User Group meets: The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club will be hosting a talk on the Hurd and the Debian GNU/Hurd operating system. There will also be a gpg keysigning and installfest for GNU/Hurd following the talk. All are welcome, and gpg keys are not required.
Date: 26 Jan 2002
Time: 1400 (2pm EST)
Place: University of Waterloo, Math and Computers building, room 3001 (comfy lounge).
More information about this event at thug@gnu.org
An interview with Marcus Brinkmann was published by Pro-Linux (the interview is in German).