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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 mendax on Saturday April 18 2015, @04:48AM
Why do the GNU people even bother with Hurd. Yes, it's different. Yes, it's unusual. Yes, it may allow some very interesting things to occur. But, in an open-source, Unix-like OS world dominated by Linux and *BSD (let us not forget Darwin, the underpinnings of MacOS), and the amazing things that have been done with all of them, do we really need another Unix-like one?
Frankly, the most interesting and innovative operating system that has been developed in the last 25 years was BeOS. I don't see how Hurd could ever come close to it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Saturday April 18 2015, @08:38AM
You need to distinguish between the Operating System (OS) and the kernel.
Linux is the kernel, but the Operating System is mostly built on GNU utilities, which is why some people insist on referring to the combination as GNU/Linux.
Hurd is not an alternative Operating System, it is an alternative kernel. So you could have an operating system that uses Hurd as its kernel, and GNU utilities, and could therefore be referred to as GNU/Hurd.
The benefit of having a different kernel is that different kernels can be optimised for different things. Hurd is an example of a microkernel, which many people thought was a promising way of writing a 'better' (for limited values of better) kernel than 'monolithic' kernels. The Wikipedia article will tell you more about microkernels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel [wikipedia.org] - and indeed you can find out about monolithic kernels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolithic_kernel [wikipedia.org] and hybrid kernels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel [wikipedia.org] there too.