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posted by martyb on Friday April 17 2015, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the whole-bunch-of-hairy-beasts dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by fnj on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:32AM

    by fnj (1654) on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:32AM (#172277)

    Wrong. XNU is a mix of micro and monolithic. Mach 3.0 is IN it, so it is ignorant to say it has nothing to do with "the original Mach microkernel".

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @12:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2015, @12:40PM (#172378)

    The NeXT era was 25 years ago! There has been a huge amount of code change since then. Just because the term "mach" is still used in some kernel-level function names it doesn't mean that much of the original Mach code is still present.

    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:36PM

      by fnj (1654) on Saturday April 18 2015, @03:36PM (#172444)

      The NeXT era was 25 years ago! There has been a huge amount of code change since then. Just because the term "mach" is still used in some kernel-level function names it doesn't mean that much of the original Mach code is still present.

      XNU in OS X is very much in the same form as XNU in NeXTSTEP. Both use Mach plus BSD kernel (and userland). The Mach part is upgraded from 2.5 to 3.0, and I/O Kit replaces Driver Kit.

      In XNU, Mach code is used for:
      thread and process preemption
      protected memory
      virtual memory management
      inter-process communication
      interrupt management
      real-time support
      kernel debugging support
      console I/O

      Those are pretty critical and far-reaching functions. So they chose not to route syscalls through Mach, and use the microkernel "server" model. That does not mean that Mach is not in there, and doing a lot of the things it was designed to do.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:56PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Saturday April 18 2015, @07:56PM (#172558) Journal
    It's not a microkernel. The BSD server runs entirely in kernel mode and there is no separation between portions of the kernel. The fact that a chunk of the code originated in a microkernel doesn't make it a microkernel: all BSD derivatives contain a VM subsystem derived Mach VM, but that doesn't make them microkernels. Recent (actually, not very recent now) versions of XNU removed external pager support, so you can't even run the swap daemon outside of the kernel.
    --
    sudo mod me up