Great Work Madhu !!! We are proud of you for the hard work you have done !!! It was such an important task and you have stood up to the challenge and delivered.
And you truly deserve this special mention. I'm sure this would be a great motivations to many students.
Keep up the good work.
Happy Hacking Praveen
PS: We should plan to give a special gift to Madhu on SFD to celebrate this.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Banck mbanck@debian.org Date: 2008/9/15 Subject: Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Hello,
it has been more than three years since the last "Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters"[1], high time for an update on the port.
* Snapshot releases
Three new snapshot releases have been done by Philip Charles, K14, K15 (which was only done as an updated mini CD-ISO, not a full snapshot), and K16. K16 has been released[2] on December 18th, 2007 featuring four CDs or two DVDs. Additionally, it also features a ready-to-go qemu-image[3] for the first time. K16 was also the first snapshot which included TLS (Thread Local Storage), a requirement for modern glibcs. New ported packages include Qt3, Qt4, SDL and Emacs22.
* Base and toolchain status
Currently, most base packages are current, with the notable exception of util-linux, which has been a big problem over the last years. However, Samuel Thibault got all outstanding issues of util-linux applied upstream so the version in experimental is mostly working. The toolchain is in pretty good shape as well since TLS support got implemented; we are using the current glibc, binutils and gcc Debian packages unmodified.
* Xen support
Besides qemu, which can be very slow to run, a Xen DomU port for GNU Mach has been made available by Samuel Thibault. It requires a non-PAE hypervisor and some minor manual tweaking, but is otherwise quite functional and stable already, see its wiki page[4] for further information. This will make people running the Hurd less dependent on specific hardware, as a lot of newer computers do not work with the underlying GNU Mach kernel anymore.
* Autobuilder availability and archive coverage improved
The percentage of packages built for Debian GNU/Hurd has improved from 40% to now nearly 60%[5] since the last Bits from the porters. Further, the backlog of outdated packages has been greatly reduced. This is due to the addition of two[6][7] Xen autobuilders earlier this year, which made the hurd-i386 autobuilders far more robust and fault-tolerant as they not need local admin attention anymore in case of problems with the GNU/Hurd guests.
The remaining 40% of packages are either waiting for other packages to become available (see [8] for a (big) graph of those relationships) or are failing for some reason[9]; a complete list of build failures can be found at [10].
* Developer machine
We are currently working on getting a general DD-accessible porter box setup. In the meantime, interested people can contact hurd-shell-account@gnu.org to get an account on one of the publically accessible (Debian) GNU/Hurd developer machines. For further details, see [11].
* Summer of Code 2008
This year, the GNU Hurd participated as its own organization at Google's Summer of Code, thanks to the coordination done by Olaf Buddenhagen[12]. All of the 5 projects were carried out quite successfully. The most practically relevant project for Debian GNU/Hurd was the implementation of a procfs translator[13] by Madhusudan C.S., which provides a traditional Unix-style /proc file system and the subsequent porting of the procps package, so utilities like pgrep etc. will be available after lenny, and procps Build-Depends no longer need to be special-cased on hurd-i386.
Other GSoC projects were lisp bindings by Flavio Cruz, better system debugging and tracing by Andrei Barbu, namespace-based translator selection by Sergiu Ivanov and network virtualization by Zheng Da. More information on the details and outcome of those projects can be found on the wiki[14].
* Still no debian-installer
Unfortunately, the Debian GNU/Hurd port still lacks d-i support. On the other hand, debootstrap now mostly works, even to cross-debootstrap a hurd-i386 installation from GNU/Linux, if one works around bug #498731. A relatively easy solution could be to use the GNU/Linux d-i to cross-install and setup a Debian GNU/Hurd system. People who have experience in d-i and possibly Debian GNU/Hurd are more than welcome to contact us at debian-hurd@lists.debian.org.
for the Debian GNU/Hurd porters,
Michael Banck
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/07/msg00006.html [2] http://kerneltrap.org/node/15770 [3] http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/K16/debian-hurd-k16-qemu.img.tar.gz [4] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports/xen/ [5] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/stats/ [6] http://buildd.net/cgi/hostpackages.cgi?unstable_arch=hurd-i386&searchtyp... [7] http://buildd.net/cgi/hostpackages.cgi?unstable_arch=hurd-i386&searchtyp... [8] http://dept-info.labri.fr/~thibault/tmp/graph-radial.pdf [9] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/unsorted/PortingIssues/ [10] http://unstable.buildd.net/buildd/hurd-i386_Failed.html [11] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/public_hurd_boxen/ [12] http://code.google.com/soc/2008/hurd/about.html [13] http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/hurd/news/20080903T160206Z.html [14] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/community/gsoc/