Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters

From: Michael Banck <mbanck-AT-debian.org> To: debian-devel-announce-AT-lists.debian.org Subject: Bits from the Debian GNU/Hurd porters Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:07:16 +0200 Message-ID: <20080915100716.GY24267@nighthawk.chemicalconnection.dyndns.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 Further, the backlog of outdated packages has been greatly reduced.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/msg... [2] http://kerneltrap.org/node/15770 [3] http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/K16/debian-hurd-k16... [4] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/microkernel/mach/gnumach/po... [5] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/stats/ [6] http://buildd.net/cgi/hostpackages.cgi?unstable_arch=hurd... [7] http://buildd.net/cgi/hostpackages.cgi?unstable_arch=hurd... [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/20080903T160206... [14] http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/community/gsoc/