Phoronix reports that version 0.6 of GNU Hurd has been released. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it's still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn't offer any compelling new features.
GNU Hurd 0.6 has "numerous cleanups and stylistic fixes" to the code-base, the message dispatching code in Hurd servers is now better, there's support for protected payloads of GNU March 1.5+, libz/libz2 are used as the decompressors to replace gz/bz2, the native fakeroot has improved, the performance of the integer hashing library has improved, and the init server has been split into the start-up server and a SysVinit-style program. The procfs and random translators were also merged.
More details on the new GNU Hurd release can be found via the 0.6 release announcement issued by Thomas Schwinge.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Friday April 17 2015, @09:12PM
Having a machine (or image) bootup in seconds (maybe even under a second, with modern hardware) is great for real-time scaling.
Your site is getting slashdotted? Add more workers in SECONDS. In REAL real-time.
Yes, we have the clouds now, and all that stuff, but it's an all round cool concept, and probably has still some innovations to offer. Hybrid kernels wouldn't have been possible without people pushing for micro, for example. I think there's still potential to be found there.
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