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GNU Hurd 0.6 Released, Still x86, Still 32-bit

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: 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.