On Friday, 11 September 2020 18:47:55 CEST Marc Dunivan wrote: > To Whom It May Concern: > > I understand that the I4 micro-kernel for GNU Hurd is dead, and that > micro kernels beyond GNU Mach are just research.
Well, it would seem that there is no apparent interest in L4-family microkernels for the Hurd, at least from its remaining developers, and so other microkernels have only moved beyond research and into actual products outside the realms of the Hurd. Although one might think that there is some kind of community around the Hurd that might entertain discussion and experimentation around operating system design, a perusal of the mailing list archives mostly reveals plenty of brainstorming, speculation, the occasional blue sky project being spun off and losing momentum, plus a degree of infighting, interpersonal conflict and impatience towards people not mucking in to get the Hurd "finished". While all of that was going on, a few of the L4 microkernels actually became available. Sadly, public discussion around those is pretty muted even amongst the more prominent ones. My guess is that people are busy using them in niche applications. > What is the GNU mailing list to follow for the future direction of the GNU > Hurd Project? ( What micro-kernel? ARM AARCH64? USB Hurd server support? > Graphics processor support? ) It is unclear to me as to which documentation > one should be reading and what physical hardware is being targeted as > reference platforms for developers to use, and for what purpose? What are > people working on? You might want to follow the bug-hurd list on the same mailing list server for Hurd development discussions. The list name is misleading - you would think that it is about bug reports - but I guess it started out as some kind of joke. > Is its use for a graphical-shell personal computer still even being > considered? My impression is that you can use the Hurd today for a graphical desktop experience, but there are a number of limitations around the kind of hardware that will actually support it. A few challenges that I can think of are... Portability: Mach is supposed to be portable, but I doubt it is getting the exercise it needs any more. Also, multi-core/processor support is only in its earliest stages in the Hurd, as I understand it. I imagine that various Mach- based systems did support SMP in that I can't imagine things like OSF/1 (Tru64 Unix) not supporting it, but there is likely to be quite a bit of work needed to recover (or introduce) support for such lost features. Hardware support: I don't know whether USB devices are supported, for example, but a while back there was limited or no support for them in the Hurd. The common thing many projects of this nature do is to try and pull in driver support from other places (typically Linux or the NetBSD rump kernel stuff), but I remain fairly unconvinced that this is the magic bullet everyone thinks it is. Documentation: as you may have noticed, documentation for the Hurd appears to be some very old white papers, some patchy reference documentation, and a bunch of IRC transcripts on a wiki site. Social factors: you will see plenty of inertia or what people used to call "stop energy" in the mailing lists. Just review the previous messages on this list or look at recent messages on bug-hurd for examples. One gets the impression that unless someone is either a top-level operating system architect and/or willing to burn themselves out fixing up huge amounts of existing code or writing new code in precisely the way envisaged by others who nevertheless aren't going to be writing any themselves, then new contributions are not really welcome. I recently read an article about Linux kernel development where someone actually wrote that if something or other made kernel development easier or more accessible then it would be attracting the "wrong kind" of people. Well, that would seem to be the view of some people in the Hurd development community, too, judging from recently expressed sentiments. Of course, many other people in the wider world realise that successful projects require many different types of contributors in order to actually be successful, and judging by the increasing stagnation of what was a fairly well-resourced and well-publicised project, I think we can guess whose viewpoint is the more realistic of the two. Paul P.S. These days I just do my own thing with the Fiasco microkernel and L4 Runtime Environment. Maybe it will become something more substantial one day, but in pursuing such solitary activities, at least I have no expectation of there being some kind of forum of similarly-minded individuals when, at least in the context of the Hurd (and, for the most part, Free Software generally), no such forum would seem to exist.
