Very Computer

After visiting the official HURD home page at :

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/hurd.html

I am left wondering what will become of my favourite OS, Linux, once
a stable HURD is released ? Please don't call me a traitor.  After
abandoning my Amiga, I don't feel very religious about the computer or
the OS I am using.

HURD, will require more CPU power, memory and disk space to run than
Linux.  But then, so did Linux when it came out and was being compared
to Minix.

To me, the major advantage of HURD is SMP support. I have a Pentium 90, the
fastest machine I could get at the time of purchase for Linux.  After putting
in 64 MBs of memory I was hoping that the machine would perform exceptionally
well.  While it performs quite well in most cases, a simple copy of a long
file, > 10MB, can slow it down considerably, a gzip on the same file can take
the average load from 0.00 to 6.70 and bring the machine to its knees, making
it almost unusable for anything else.

I would like to get a dual P-100 machine since these have become VERY
affordable now, but Linux does not support them.

I am wonderig how are Linux enthusiasts responding to the HURD announcement ?
Will Linux be able to compete ?

Mubashir Cheema

        I don't really have anything to say for or against the rest of
your article, but I have gzipped entire 250+ mb partitions and the
load did not budge a great deal. It certainly did not go above 1.2 (I
did this while running X with 10 or so different apps running). And I
have a 486-80 with 16 megs of ram. Something is very wrong with your
configuration, be it software or hardware.

Roman

--
Richard Cooley Extraordinaire           "Yeah.  Arrgh."

Quote:>Mubashir Cheema

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Warwick
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Mubashir Cheema

 And if our local GTLUG (Golden Triangle Linux User Group) would become
 GTHUG ?  

Mubashir Cheema

: >>After visiting the official HURD home page ...
: >>I am left wondering what will become of my favourite OS, Linux, once
: >>a stable HURD is released ? Please don't call me a traitor.

: >Does it matter?  You are essentially running UNIX, which HURD remains.

:  I guess my question should have been, if the Linux community plans on
:  supporting HURD or changing Linux to compete ?

HURD is not Unix.  (Read the Web page;  HURD can act like Unix, but
in reality it is something new and different (i.e weird).

HURD will run on Mach.  Mach is a microkernel desiged to have
something akin to multiple OS's running on top of it.  Somebody is
working on a Linux server that runs on top of Mach, somebody else is
working on a BSD on (I think), so if (i) you want to run HURD, and
(ii) you can afford the performance hit of Mach (supposedly 4.0 is
better) then you can run HURD and Linux _at the same time_ on top of
the Mach kernel.

It's said that the next version of OS/2 will be built on the Mach
kernel, so you could run HURD there also.  (I'll stick with Linux
though, its lean and mean).

Steve

Consider that on espresso.cafe.net, a P90 with 32MB RAM (half of what
you have, right?)  I've run two copies of doom, an Xpilot game (both
on the console).  Another guy was using xv on a connected X display.
On top of all that, I ran a compilation of GCC. There were about 5
users connected via dial-up, none of whom complained about the load.

: After visiting the official HURD home page at :

[stuff deleted]

: I am wonderig how are Linux enthusiasts responding to the HURD announcement ?
: Will Linux be able to compete ?

I rely on the linuxss-projekt to give us a Linux-Server for the HURD.
So when HURD comes, Linux will be there.

BTW, last time I visited the HURD home page they were using Linux as a host.
Is HURD self-hosting now?

Your problem is very likely that you probably have a cheap drive controller
(ISA perhaps?) or a slow drive, but more likely the card. Upgrading your
cards can provide a signifigant performance gain, reducing the I/O
bottleneck.

The load average makes no sense. From what I know, a system load of 1.00
means that there is one CPU-bound process in the last minute (or 5 or 15)
(and it ran for pretty much that whole time). 6.70 makes no sense unless you
had 7 processes all fighting for control for the CPU, in which case yes,
your machine is going to be slow, you probably have some zombies to kill,
and a problem to solve!

Quote:

>I would like to get a dual P-100 machine since these have become VERY
>affordable now, but Linux does not support them.

>I am wonderig how are Linux enthusiasts responding to the HURD announcement ?
>Will Linux be able to compete ?

>Mubashir Cheema

        God put me on earth to accomplish a certain number of things
                Right now I am so far behind I will never die
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

If HURD is wonderful everyone will switch to it. A lot of us spent years
trying to make CP/M, DOS, Minix, Amiga look and work like Unix. We've now
got decent unixoid systems and unix is unix is unix so Hurd wouldn't be
a painful switch.

Alan
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