GNU Hurd at Guix days

GNU Hurd at Guix days

[pjotr.public12]

We had a very interesting discussion about the Hurd. I ran the Hurd
before, but now I am going down the rabbit hole of reading device
drivers and such. It is very interesting. 

I envisage a 'Cloud Hurd' that have minimal hardware demands and a
Guix system definition.  Running a Guile webserver, for example, could
be really, really tiny. ARM support and RISC-V support may come and
that will make it even more exciting. Try and trim a Linux kernel to
size and you know what I mean. Goblin nano services, anyone? Or an
out-of-the-box mail service?

It is not about performance, obviously, but about minimalism.

I hit this paper online btw - a recent generic writeup:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373235211_GNU_Hurd_Design_Implementation_and_Future_Prospects_of_the_Microkernel-Based_Operating_System

Pj.

Re: GNU Hurd at Guix days

[Tanguy LE CARROUR]

Hi Pjotr,


Quoting pjotr.public12@thebird.nl (2024-02-06 08:48:56)
> We had a very interesting discussion about the Hurd.

Very interesting, indeed! 10+ persons in a room talking about Hurd!
I guess that hadn’t happened in a long time! 😉

On my side, I decided to start patching broken packages… again! [1]

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software//hurd/user/tlecarrour.html

First thing yesterday morning, I set up a ChildHurd and try to offload
build to it and… it worked! 😎

Unfortunately, the default image seems to be to small to build "real"
packages. I increased it, but… then my real disk was suddenly too small!
This is a problem that came up multiple times while discussing with
Simon… so I decided to upgrade my disk… and I now have to re-install
—I miserably failed my attempt at cross-installing and ended up with a
brick! 😱—, so I thought "why not use the latest installer?" [2].

[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-02/msg00068.html

I also have to figure out what’s the proper way to hack with this set up.
Probably a mixture of `build --system`, `build --source`, `diff -purN`,
`--with-patch=`…
So, I guess, you’ll hear from me soon! 😁

Regards,

-- 
Tanguy

Re: GNU Hurd at Guix days

[Maxim Cournoyer]

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Hi,

pjotr.public12@thebird.nl writes:

> We had a very interesting discussion about the Hurd. I ran the Hurd
> before, but now I am going down the rabbit hole of reading device
> drivers and such. It is very interesting. 
>
> I envisage a 'Cloud Hurd' that have minimal hardware demands and a
> Guix system definition.  Running a Guile webserver, for example, could
> be really, really tiny. ARM support and RISC-V support may come and
> that will make it even more exciting. Try and trim a Linux kernel to
> size and you know what I mean. Goblin nano services, anyone? Or an
> out-of-the-box mail service?
>
> It is not about performance, obviously, but about minimalism.
>
> I hit this paper online btw - a recent generic writeup:
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373235211_GNU_Hurd_Design_Implementation_and_Future_Prospects_of_the_Microkernel-Based_Operating_System

Thanks for sharing.   The document was a bit difficult to get with
Cloudfare checks in IceCat, and was also in the .docx format.  I've
produced a PDF with it with LibreOffice, attached for convenience.


[-- Attachment #2: FinalGNUHurdResearchPaper.pdf --]
[-- Type: application/pdf, Size: 269905 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 19 bytes --]


-- 
Thanks,
Maxim

Guix Hurd at… Guix@Paris! [Was: GNU Hurd at Guix days]

[Tanguy LE CARROUR]

Dear Guix,

Yesterday, during the Guix@Paris S02E05 we talked about what happened
during Guix Days 2024 and… about the Hurd session.

I demoed my shiny new ChildHurd offload-able setup and… some one
did the setup live on his laptop, reconfigured and built it’s first
package for `i586-gnu` in less than 5 min! 😎

Thanks to all those who, over the years, have helped to bring
the entry cost down to such a low level it's almost indecent! 😁

May 2024 be the year of the Hurd! 🤞

Regards.

-- 
Tanguy

Hurd download image is too small; Was: Re: Guix Hurd at… Guix@Paris! [Was: GNU Hurd at Guix days]

[Pjotr Prins]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2024 at 08:27:49AM +0100, Tanguy LE CARROUR wrote:
> May 2024 be the year of the Hurd! 🤞

It looks like it with LLVM on Hurd coming! I predict the Guix, Hurd
`Mes' next as a hackable system. Add SMP and RISC-V and the fun really
starts. What a time to be alive :)

BTW the Hurd download image on the Guix website has a really small
partition. Even installing a simple package runs out of disk space. Is
there a reason for that, or could we default to something bigger (say
20Gb)? The actual gcow2 download size will not be larger.

I tried expanding the ext2 partition from Linux and, while it worked,
it gave interesting ext2 errors and crashed the fs. I guess the
non-Hurd resize commands introduces some incompatibility. I know I can
build an image with Guix, but it is not ideal if people can not just
use the download image to try stuff. What is the point of making a
download available ;)

Any trick I am missing?

Pj.

Re: Hurd download image is too small; Was: Re: Guix Hurd at… Guix@Paris! [Was: GNU Hurd at Guix days]

[Tanguy LE CARROUR]

Quoting Pjotr Prins (2024-02-10 13:16:16)
> On Fri, Feb 09, 2024 at 08:27:49AM +0100, Tanguy LE CARROUR wrote:
> > May 2024 be the year of the Hurd! 🤞
> BTW the Hurd download image on the Guix website has a really small
> partition. […] Any trick I am missing?

I hope you are not asking *me*!? 😅

I’m now a childhurd enthusiast and I won’t use the VM image anytime soon.
The default childhurd’s disk is also too small, but it’s really easy to increase it.


-- 
Tanguy