From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones...
...PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks...
I know this is in jest, but because of the "hurr durr" connotations, only the absolute most bearded of free software zealot neckbeards are going to ever run GNU Hurd beyond simplytest driving it.
Open source continues its unbroken streak of showing us why naming things is important.
I have no idea why you think this. You might be terminally online. Hurd is just like "herd" because it's a microkernel, and hurr durr is some social media/gamer shit a tiny amount of people started saying decades after Hurd started being developed.
>I have no idea why you think this. You might be terminally online.
Really? No idea at all? None whatsoever?
Hey maybe it's me and you're right. I'm sure next year will be the year of the GNU/Hurd Desktop. Or, as I've taken to calling it "The year of the GNU plus Hurd Desktop".
People in decision-making positions of course are notorious for being rational actors and always choosing the thing that performs best on its technical merits, never being subconsciously swayed subjective factors. When faced with a choice between commercially-supported software that has had some thought put into its branding (of which naming is a major part) versus some free software that is technically and morally/ethically superior, with a childish name fronted by a dude who eats his own toe jam on camera, I'm certain they'll choose the latter every time, as history has shown.
Does anyone more familiar with Hurd know how they addressed performance issues encountered by other Mach-based kernels? I remember reading that one of Mach's bottlenecks was validating that each IPC message had proper permissions/access when sending them between processes due to the large number and frequency of messages.
Mach's problem wasn't that it had slow IPC, but rather that in terms of microkernels, Mach was pretty damn big.
There are some very fast microkernels out there, like the L4 family, which negate the IPC overhead of microkernels by being small enough to fit entirely in the L2 cache of most processors. Linux may only have the single IPC call per round trip, but it's a fucking huge kernel and there is typically a ton of cache thrashing going on.
Are you saying there is cache thrashing because callers often sercice rheid own requests themselves? If you don't want to service requests in the same thread, doesnt it mean you have to spend entire core(s) for running the kernel?
Yes, you want to do more IPC, its basically linear with the increase in performance. So the amount of overhead stays the same basically. At least in IPC benchmarks and those tend to be important.
So for an I/O heavy program like a web browser, what percentage of CPU time is spent in syscalls? Someone must have that data for Firefox. 1%? 10%? And then that moves to 1.1% (or 11%)? And then every other program is even less affected? Curious if anyone is in the know.
What even is a 20% delta in performance? Like a five year old difference in hardware design.
If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.
If anything, Mach style IPC has gotten worse because of the greater overhead if kernel/user transitions. Spectre really did a number on context switching overhead.
I'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ).
I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
This is what I like about Haiku OS, they have focused a lot functionality and have that fairly solid, now optimization and stability is being worked on more closely.
> 9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS
How is it not robust? What metric did they use? Fault tolerance is not explained here so I don't know what they mean by this. You can use aan(8) on 9front which runs on each side of the connection and holds it open if the network breaks, then resume on reconnect.
I hold out hope for (human) work to coalesce on creating a stable/secure microkernel (SeL4 anybody???) and getting it mature enough to build an OS on.
Once that is done, then you build out the absolutely massive collection of userspace drivers that would be needed to replace linux by leveraging LLMs and other automated techniques. The good part is that by keeping the drivers in userspace, the security risk of generative techniques for driver development is pretty low.
While I upvoted this, as being true for the general population, for me Linux has made it on the desktop (and laptop) much more than 2 decades ago, around 2003, when the remaining problems that had forced me to use dual-booting with Windows had been solved (i.e. when it became possible in Linux to play movies, read DVDs and use TV tuners). When that happened, I wiped out Windows from my computers.
If you have a pro to help you, already for a long time Linux has been fine on the desktop for anyone. My parents, over 80 years old, have used Linux on their PCs for many years, and they did not even know what "Linux" is. That was possible because I installed and configured for them the operating system and all the applications they needed for reading and writing documents, Internet browsing, e-mail, music listening and movie watching etc.
Windows is easy only because it comes preinstalled. I have installed Windows at work on many kinds of computers and during installation I have encountered much more problems impossible to solve for a non-expert than when installing Linux.
Pretty much. I have been using Linux since 1998 but it became my only system back in about 2009 I think. It just isn't that geeky blued together unix-y thing any more. So long as your hardware is supported, thats it.
Yes, the games support was rough but that is almost a non issue nowadays. Thanks to Proton and Steamdeck support, I don't even check compatibility any more on games.
However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction
This should be a lesson about providing a product versus providing a technology.
Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a gamebox." Of course, people don't actually want gameboxes either - they want to play games - but it's a few steps closer.
It just...has made it. Plenty of power users just use it as their primary OS. I think official figures under-estimate it because many people daily-driving will spoof user agents of other OSes.
Ah, Android, with a userspace based on Java, Kotlin, C and C++ standard libraries, Android native APIs, without anything related to GNU/Linux, unless it is a rooted device, or one gets to package a full Linux userspace as an APK, which isn't fully compatible due to security enforcement mechanisms.
I would look into those statistics regarding desktop world wide adoption, distribution per OS.
It gives a Linux experience within the security sandbox from Android, which is why there are limitations when using it on regular devices, via PlayStore.
Also it requires working around the NDK limitations on available POSIX APIs.
As a sign in the window of a tiny shop in my quiet suburb says "Laptop and phone repairs - Windows, Linux and MacOS". If that doesn't count, I don't know what else could.
Eric S. Raymond opines that now that Microsoft makes its profits mainly from Azure, some product owner in Microsoft will be allowed to enshittify Windows for collection short-term profit, thus paving way for Linux on the desktop.
First there will be the Desktop Linux of the year
breakthrough. Evil folks say it will coincide with
the end of the world via a total global catastrophy
but these people don't understand beauty - such as
TempleOS, the most perfect OS of all times.
I can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical.
I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.
There was a brief period about 10 years back where there was a sudden burst of activity on Hurd, but that started to dwindle shortly afterwards. Alas, it is like Fusion power, always moving forwards but under funded to get it across the line into something more.
For every year development Hurd moves forward, so does everyone else's, only the they have much more resources.
Next year will be the year of GNU Hurd, as well as
The Desktop Linux Year and people really using
HaikuOS on real hardware for years. You read it here
first!
Ha I just booted Haiku on my desktop yesterday and it ran surprisingly well. Kind of took me back to 2001. If Firefox is stable on it I actually probably could switch from Windows (my needs are pretty simple at home).
It seems Samuel Thibault is still there, sweet.
ps: some slides from earlier this year https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on...
full vid here https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnu...
Cool to finally see some small silly tech stuff here that isn't trying to make money.
You are calling a Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux) killer small silly stuff?
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, just Linux.
I’ve recently taken to calling it GNU minus Linux.
Are you saying that Hurd will also kill Google/Linux?
What I'm saying is that Hurd is just a kernel in the same way that Linux is also just a kernel
The snark artist in me would say that Linux is a kernel plus tens of millions of lines of code that absolutely should not be in the kernel but are.
Hurd specifically includes a userspace. Its kernel is Mach.
Yeah GNU hasn't really been involved for a long time. It's Mozilla/Linux in reality. Not to mention the totally GNU-free distributions, like Alpine.
The efforts people will go to in order to avoid GPL3. Makes you wonder why?
No, what they're referring to as a GNU/Linux is in fact GNU Hurd.
This is not GNU/Linux. GNU Hurd is a totally different kernel.
Of course it’s a large and complex project in terms of code, but in terms of industrial impact it’s unlikely to ever amount to much.
Linux just has too much momentum and there are too few real benefits to Hurd.
I know this is in jest, but because of the "hurr durr" connotations, only the absolute most bearded of free software zealot neckbeards are going to ever run GNU Hurd beyond simplytest driving it.
Open source continues its unbroken streak of showing us why naming things is important.
That seems like an awesome reason to use it in an era of most software is an AI slopfest.
Go for it. I'll probably stick to Linux, though.
GNU Hurd Durd?
> but because of the "hurr durr" connotations
I have no idea why you think this. You might be terminally online. Hurd is just like "herd" because it's a microkernel, and hurr durr is some social media/gamer shit a tiny amount of people started saying decades after Hurd started being developed.
>I have no idea why you think this. You might be terminally online.
Really? No idea at all? None whatsoever?
Hey maybe it's me and you're right. I'm sure next year will be the year of the GNU/Hurd Desktop. Or, as I've taken to calling it "The year of the GNU plus Hurd Desktop".
People in decision-making positions of course are notorious for being rational actors and always choosing the thing that performs best on its technical merits, never being subconsciously swayed subjective factors. When faced with a choice between commercially-supported software that has had some thought put into its branding (of which naming is a major part) versus some free software that is technically and morally/ethically superior, with a childish name fronted by a dude who eats his own toe jam on camera, I'm certain they'll choose the latter every time, as history has shown.
Does anyone more familiar with Hurd know how they addressed performance issues encountered by other Mach-based kernels? I remember reading that one of Mach's bottlenecks was validating that each IPC message had proper permissions/access when sending them between processes due to the large number and frequency of messages.
Mach's problem wasn't that it had slow IPC, but rather that in terms of microkernels, Mach was pretty damn big.
There are some very fast microkernels out there, like the L4 family, which negate the IPC overhead of microkernels by being small enough to fit entirely in the L2 cache of most processors. Linux may only have the single IPC call per round trip, but it's a fucking huge kernel and there is typically a ton of cache thrashing going on.
>small enough to fit entirely in the L2 cache
Shouldn't the "hot" path fit in the L1 of a "modern" processor (100 kB+)?
Are you saying there is cache thrashing because callers often sercice rheid own requests themselves? If you don't want to service requests in the same thread, doesnt it mean you have to spend entire core(s) for running the kernel?
Is that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?
Yes, you want to do more IPC, its basically linear with the increase in performance. So the amount of overhead stays the same basically. At least in IPC benchmarks and those tend to be important.
Making that fast is fundamental to any OS.
So for an I/O heavy program like a web browser, what percentage of CPU time is spent in syscalls? Someone must have that data for Firefox. 1%? 10%? And then that moves to 1.1% (or 11%)? And then every other program is even less affected? Curious if anyone is in the know.
Isn't it even worse now? The faster computers get, the more that software-induced bottlenecks hurt.
I could see just powering through because modern hardware is fast enough to do so being an option.
Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.
What even is a 20% delta in performance? Like a five year old difference in hardware design.
If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.
Hurd is like 36 years old at this point. More like adding 20% to a 10 second operation, compared to adding 20% to a 10ms operation.
If anything, Mach style IPC has gotten worse because of the greater overhead if kernel/user transitions. Spectre really did a number on context switching overhead.
People lost their shit when Spectre mitigations added 20% overhead to kernel calls though. Why wouldn't they do the same for microkernel overhead?
If people really cared about performance, we'd be doing something other than the bloated way we have been doing things.
https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo
I'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ).
I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
I mean, every major arch has crypto specific acceleration instructions.
Is there reason to think they've addressed them?
Lets get to a usable feature set before optimization.
This is what I like about Haiku OS, they have focused a lot functionality and have that fairly solid, now optimization and stability is being worked on more closely.
> 9pfs for the Hurd
From the wiki:
> 9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS
How is it not robust? What metric did they use? Fault tolerance is not explained here so I don't know what they mean by this. You can use aan(8) on 9front which runs on each side of the connection and holds it open if the network breaks, then resume on reconnect.
> I plan to build bootable images and boot the kernel on Apple M1
GuixSD with GNU Hurd would be a really fun way to repurpose an old MBP.
My M1 is currently running Guix on Fedora, I would love to see this!
I hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.
Instead of rewriting Bun, maybe Anthropic should have thrown some tokens at finishing Hurd.
I hold out hope for (human) work to coalesce on creating a stable/secure microkernel (SeL4 anybody???) and getting it mature enough to build an OS on.
Once that is done, then you build out the absolutely massive collection of userspace drivers that would be needed to replace linux by leveraging LLMs and other automated techniques. The good part is that by keeping the drivers in userspace, the security risk of generative techniques for driver development is pretty low.
We'd have to name it Turd then.
That'd be GNU/Turd to you!
Next year will be the year of Hurd on the desktop, I am sure of it.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1508/
Fun fact: Duke Nukem Forever shipped before GNU Hurd.
Maybe they are still in the same level of forever. Oh well.
"I come here to code GNU Hurd and chew bubblegum, and I got a whole lotta bubblegum..."
Come GIT some!
Sorry, only pun I could think of.
Nah, Claude will finish it over night
That's what they tell us, but for some reason software still looks just as bad or worse than it ever has.
Hurd will have its day once Linux makes it on the desktop :-)
While I upvoted this, as being true for the general population, for me Linux has made it on the desktop (and laptop) much more than 2 decades ago, around 2003, when the remaining problems that had forced me to use dual-booting with Windows had been solved (i.e. when it became possible in Linux to play movies, read DVDs and use TV tuners). When that happened, I wiped out Windows from my computers.
If you have a pro to help you, already for a long time Linux has been fine on the desktop for anyone. My parents, over 80 years old, have used Linux on their PCs for many years, and they did not even know what "Linux" is. That was possible because I installed and configured for them the operating system and all the applications they needed for reading and writing documents, Internet browsing, e-mail, music listening and movie watching etc.
Windows is easy only because it comes preinstalled. I have installed Windows at work on many kinds of computers and during installation I have encountered much more problems impossible to solve for a non-expert than when installing Linux.
Pretty much. I have been using Linux since 1998 but it became my only system back in about 2009 I think. It just isn't that geeky blued together unix-y thing any more. So long as your hardware is supported, thats it.
Yes, the games support was rough but that is almost a non issue nowadays. Thanks to Proton and Steamdeck support, I don't even check compatibility any more on games.
Linux has made it to the desktop, packaged inside VMs served by Apple, Microsoft and Google.
That's not really what everyone means.
However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction
This should be a lesson about providing a product versus providing a technology.
Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a gamebox." Of course, people don't actually want gameboxes either - they want to play games - but it's a few steps closer.
Why are you still manually executing commands like it's pre-fable 2025?
No, but that is what they will ever get from OEMs selling PCs at computer stores used by normies.
Also lets not forget those distros play Windows games, because hardly any studio bothers with native Linux games.
They play both, which is much better for adoption anyway? And it's contributed substantial improvements back to wine and other projects.
It is hardly any different that saying gaming on Linux is great because MAME exists.
Game studios will keep buying Windows, using Visual Studio, and let Valve do the needful.
Additionally people keep acting as if Valve and Gabe will be around forever, they won't, none of us will.
It just...has made it. Plenty of power users just use it as their primary OS. I think official figures under-estimate it because many people daily-driving will spoof user agents of other OSes.
And there's Android.
Ah, Android, with a userspace based on Java, Kotlin, C and C++ standard libraries, Android native APIs, without anything related to GNU/Linux, unless it is a rooted device, or one gets to package a full Linux userspace as an APK, which isn't fully compatible due to security enforcement mechanisms.
I would look into those statistics regarding desktop world wide adoption, distribution per OS.
Anyone who wants it can have Termux which gives you a full Linux experience under Android with GNU tools if you want it, though.
No it does not.
It gives a Linux experience within the security sandbox from Android, which is why there are limitations when using it on regular devices, via PlayStore.
Also it requires working around the NDK limitations on available POSIX APIs.
People using Linux in 1992 would say something similar to people using any of the current flavours of Linux.
No they wouldn't, given that the only reason I got into Linux was the lackluster POSIX support on Windows NT.
Oh come on. :-)
Linux is not userspace. Linux is a kernel, and android is a parallel fork of the kernel. So android is a version of linux but is not GNU/Linux.
Android/Linux, if you will. We dont have to be shy this.
Yeah, exactly because of that, lets not do victory laps for a kernel.
GNU/Linux, the Linux desktop, has zero relevance on Android.
No one, not a single person, buying Android tablets and phones at places like MediaMarkt, cares about GNU/Linux Desktop.
They care about what apps via PlayStore, Samsung, Huawei and Xiomi stores, they can use, just like all normies.
As a sign in the window of a tiny shop in my quiet suburb says "Laptop and phone repairs - Windows, Linux and MacOS". If that doesn't count, I don't know what else could.
Linux hit 10% desktop usage recently
Not really, that was a fluke, still below 10%, although getting closer with 7.53%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Both numbers are big, no? Especially given the complete dominance of linux in many other settings.
I think it is pretty impressive if you consider ChromeOS, with all of Google's resources behind it, is at 1.47%.
Yeah, if we ignore Windows 70%, and Mac's 20% of desktop share.
Eric S. Raymond opines that now that Microsoft makes its profits mainly from Azure, some product owner in Microsoft will be allowed to enshittify Windows for collection short-term profit, thus paving way for Linux on the desktop.
https://x.com/esrtweet/status/2084605702203424896
Ah so X/Twitter is where ESR is nowadays. Kind of not surprised.
Hasn't this been happening for a while now?
First there will be the Desktop Linux of the year breakthrough. Evil folks say it will coincide with the end of the world via a total global catastrophy but these people don't understand beauty - such as TempleOS, the most perfect OS of all times.
I can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical.
I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.
There was a brief period about 10 years back where there was a sudden burst of activity on Hurd, but that started to dwindle shortly afterwards. Alas, it is like Fusion power, always moving forwards but under funded to get it across the line into something more.
For every year development Hurd moves forward, so does everyone else's, only the they have much more resources.
It’s like farmer’s market craft fair tech. Same vibes.
Last neckbeards standing?
Tales from the crypt.
Someone should do the blasphemous thing and have Opus 5 finish HURD.
Actually in all seriousness reviving dead interesting FOSS projects is one use for AI coding I've thought about.
Next year will be the year of GNU Hurd, as well as The Desktop Linux Year and people really using HaikuOS on real hardware for years. You read it here first!
Ha I just booted Haiku on my desktop yesterday and it ran surprisingly well. Kind of took me back to 2001. If Firefox is stable on it I actually probably could switch from Windows (my needs are pretty simple at home).
Wow.