Repost: Anyone interested in Gentoo GNU/Hurd?

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avenj · Post by **avenj** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 2:59 pm

I recently started work on a Gentoo GNU/Hurd port. This is far from complete (in fact, I'm running into some weird issues with GCC not liking includes...), however I'd like to be able to gauge how many people might be interested in this. (I had posted this to Alternative Architectures and was informed that it wasn't relevant to that forum.)

In reply to a reply to my original post, it's not quite as simple as that - it's an entirely different operating system (in terms of kernel-space, anyway - it's still the GNU userland, of course) and not compatible with Linux (and whenever I say Linux, I mean the kernel). You would have to install it the way you'd install from a Gentoo GNU/Linux stage tarball.

Right now, I have a statically-compiled (native compile on Debian GNU/Hurd) base system including GCC. The plan is to compile GlibC/GNUMach/MiG/Hurd there, drop Python and Portage in, set up a Hurd profile, and go from there.

darktux · Post by **darktux** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 4:49 pm

Get me a LiveCD, and I'll give it a go

Lovechild · Post by **Lovechild** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:18 pm

Sounds good to me, I would love to set up a HURD playground on my PC.

frippz · Post by **frippz** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:55 pm

Sounds interesting. However, forgive me for my ignorance, but can someone please point out some of the pro's & con's between Linux and Hurd?

A bit n00bish of me, yes I know...

echeslack · Post by **echeslack** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:58 pm

I would be interested, but don't have a spare test machine right now. Would I be correct in assuming that this would be workable in bochs as well? I don't see why it wouldn't be, but I realize that the hurd is still in development.

-ewen

Lovechild · Post by **Lovechild** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 6:07 pm

*Levi* wrote:Sounds interesting. However, forgive me for my ignorance, but can someone please point out some of the pro's & con's between Linux and Hurd?

A bit n00bish of me, yes I know...

That would be like comparing apples and oranges, if you want a system to work with every day go with Linux - HURD is still very young and lacks a lot of the cool features the Linux kernel has.

Anyways, it's just a kernel - the programs themselves doesn't really change.

For more information look up the terms Microkernel and Monolitic kernel (HURD is microkernel based, on MACH and Linux is a monolitic kernel).

avenj · Post by **avenj** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 6:08 pm

There's a Debian GNU/Hurd Bochs image available at the Bochs homepage. It's _very_ _very_ slow (if you set ips too high, it just dies).

zephyr1256 · Post by **zephyr1256** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 6:17 pm

I'm (hopefully, my application is being reviewed now) starting a master's program in the fall. This might be an interesting topic for me to work on for a thesis if I decide to do one.

avenj · Post by **avenj** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 6:25 pm

A bit of information for those interested in the Hurd in general:

The Hurd at GNU.org
Hurd Wiki at GNUfans.org
Hurd at Savannah

These urls have information about the Hurd, docs, and so on.

I have a little bit of information about my work on Gentoo GNU/Hurd here: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~avenj

magnet · Post by **magnet** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 8:51 pm

I would like to help this project , what can I do ? can you provide your hurd binairies ? , I can try to make some packages.

gsfgf · Post by **gsfgf** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 9:41 pm

could i just drop in a hurd kernel w/ linux emulation(like BSD) and run it just like another linux kernel?.
Will existing packages build under hurd or will there need to be an all new portage tree?
Is there an article outlining the current state of Hurd v. Linux?

What about gentoo BSD? That would be cool.

mmealman · Post by **mmealman** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 10:15 pm

One thing I'm curious about though, does HURD require any sort of port of Linux apps?

Will KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, or pretty much any you can get the source for under Linux compile and run under HURD?

I'm talking about the app level stuff. I understand that things like device drivers are a whole nother ballpark.

Post by **plate** » Tue Mar 18, 2003 3:57 am

Yes, it's just a matter of compiling the source code in a Hurd environment, that's all there is to it. Now, avenj has already pointed out that in practice it's probably less trivial than in theory, but Debian for example has been offering their Hurd distribution for quite a while already, and it contains pretty much the same applications you'd use in Linux. A few things will simply not work, though, there's no support for PCMCIA, for example, so you better forget about running it on your laptop...

Wanted to add a quick "me, too" here.

Very interested in giving it a go on one of the spare hosts around the house.

Jeff Binder · Post by **Jeff Binder** » Tue Mar 18, 2003 4:58 am

I've still got some unpartitioned space on my drive, so I'd try it out. I tried installing Debian GNU/Hurd a few months ago but the default kernel wouldn't boot on my system and I got stuck trying to set up a cross-binutils. But now I'm in the mood for trying out various OSes again

.

Mindstab · Post by **Mindstab** » Wed Mar 19, 2003 5:25 pm

I'd be interested to. I'd give it a shot.
Once this gets up, it also probably wouldn't be long before we could do a bsd port as well. Which to would be impressive. Then you could have gentoo everything.

So yeah, I'm interested in this

gsfgf · Post by **gsfgf** » Thu Mar 20, 2003 3:55 am

and finally gentoo/win32
eww...

avenj · Post by **avenj** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 2:26 pm

gsfgf wrote:could i just drop in a hurd kernel w/ linux emulation(like BSD) and run it just like another linux kernel?.
Will existing packages build under hurd or will there need to be an all new portage tree?
Is there an article outlining the current state of Hurd v. Linux?

What about gentoo BSD? That would be cool.

Someone was actually working on a Gentoo/NetBSD thingo. That's much tougher due to a totally different userland. GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd have mostly the same userland (in terms of a GNU base system).

Gnufsh · Post by **Gnufsh** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 10:34 pm

I'm interested. I was just thinking that this would be a good idea.

-Dan

idl · Post by **idl** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 10:44 pm

I have plenty of room left to try this out, sounds very interesting.

I often hear people putting down the Linux kernel because its messy and not very efficient, will hurd be totaly efficient and in the end a lot faster?

EvvL · Post by **EvvL** » Mon Mar 24, 2003 11:36 pm

I've been looking at playing with HURD for awhile but Debian was the only distro that had any HURD support.

If you get something going i'd be willing to play with it and test it.

Looking forward to a iso or something usable.

Good luck.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Tue Mar 25, 2003 12:40 am

I'd be very interested in trying this out. And I'm sure many others would too... perhaps it might inspire the GNU/Hurd developers to get on with developing it.

axiom255 · Post by **axiom255** » Tue Mar 25, 2003 5:25 am

Very interested!

zhenlin · Post by **zhenlin** » Tue Mar 25, 2003 8:48 am

The Linux Kernel is messy, but efficient. The HURD servers and Mach microkernel are neat but inefficient. It takes 2 seconds to do a ping to localhost in HURD! But I don't mind that, since it is beyond controllable circumstances. (Message passing is slow since it involves at least 1 memcpy(), not to mention the reciever may not respond!)

hfarberg · Post by **hfarberg** » Tue Mar 25, 2003 5:54 pm

This is something I would be very interested in. I have on several occasions tried installing Debian GNU/Hurd, but as a matter of fact Debian systems are just too damn hard for me to install

I'm sorry that I can't help you with any delopment, since I'm no programmer, but I would love to test it and share my thoughts on it.

maw · Post by **maw** » Wed Mar 26, 2003 12:11 am

I'm definitely interested in mucking about with the Hurd... once I get some more disk space, that is.

Repost: Anyone interested in Gentoo GNU/Hurd?

Repost: Anyone interested in Gentoo GNU/Hurd?

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