Everyone enjoys ASCII screenshots as much as I do, right? So here is
the Hurd booting with my mtab-prototype bound to /run/mtab:
INIT: version 2.88 booting
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
Activating swap...done.
Checking root file system...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
/dev/hd0s1: clean, 44292/181056 files, 287759/723200 blocks
done.
Activating lvm and md swap...(default pager): Already paging to partition hd0s5!
done.
Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
hd2 : tray open or drive not ready
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0
done.
Cleaning up temporary files... /tmp.
Mounting local filesystems...done.
Activating swapfile swap...(default pager): Already paging to partition hd0s5!
done.
Cleaning up temporary files....
Configuring network interfaces...inetutils-ifconfig: invalid arguments
ifup: failed to open pid file /run/network/ifup-/dev/eth0.pid: No such file or directory
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.2.2
Copyright 2004-2011 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/
can't create /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient./dev/eth0.leases: No such file or directory
Listening on Socket//dev/eth0
Sending on Socket//dev/eth0
DHCPDISCOVER on /dev/eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPREQUEST on /dev/eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPOFFER from 10.0.2.2
DHCPACK from 10.0.2.2
can't create /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient./dev/eth0.leases: No such file or directory
bound to 10.0.2.15 -- renewal in 42550 seconds.
done.
Cleaning up temporary files....
Setting up X socket directories... /tmp/.X11-unix /tmp/.ICE-unix.
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 2.
Starting enhanced syslogd: rsyslogd.
Starting deferred execution scheduler: atd.
Starting periodic command scheduler: cron.
Starting system message bus: dbusFailed to set socket option"/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket": Protocol not available.
Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshd.
GNU 0.3 (debian) (console)
login:
As you can see, the boot process looks quite clean. In particular,
there are no issues left with Debians
initscripts. The remaining
noise comes from:
- The GNU mach kernel, but that's okay. The FreeBSD kernel writes
lot's of stuff by default too, and so does Linux if one increases
the kernel log level. Also, some of the stuff might be due to me
using qemu.
- Network related issues.
- The default pager. This is the translator
paging out memory to swap space.
This is accomplished by my
mtab translator prototype. It's
work in progress, but I have reworked and broken up my initial
prototype. My initial prototype only patched
libdiskfs, one of three
libraries translator authors can use to write filesystem-like
translators. I have made the necessary changes to the other two
libraries and patched up any loose ends.
This is the translator in action:
% fsysopts /run/mtab
/hurd/mtab /
% cat /run/mtab
/dev/hd0s1 / ext2fs writable,no-inherit-dir-group,store-type=typed 0 0
none /dev/ttyp0 /hurd/term name,/dev/ptyp0,type,pty-master 0 0
none /run /hurd/tmpfs writable,no-suid,no-exec,no-inherit-dir-group,no-sync,size=80484K 0 0
none /run/lock /hurd/tmpfs writable,no-suid,no-exec,no-inherit-dir-group,no-sync,size=5M 0 0
none /run/shm /hurd/tmpfs writable,no-suid,no-exec,no-inherit-dir-group,no-sync,size=259480K 0 0
I also patched the
sysvinit
package. My version includes and switches to
runsystem.sysv that
uses
/sbin/init to start the system. It also carries all the
necessary workarounds for the remaining
sysvinit related issues.
The resulting Debian/Hurd system is very nice, it is getting more and
more similar to what a Debian user would expect:
For the first time, df without arguments works:
% df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hd0s1 10005504 4671612 4833620 50% /
none 80484 44 80440 1% /run
none 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
none 259480 4 259476 1% /run/shm
The mount utility is accompanied by umount.
/etc/fstab is honored and auto works as an fstype.
/run and friends are in fact ram-disks.
/sbin/shutdown works.
All init scripts are properly started and stopped.
- Among other nice things this enables one to manage the network
configuration using the Debian way via interfaces(5).
/etc/inittab is honored.
I have rebuild the
hurd and
sysvinit package and uploaded them
into an apt repository:
deb http://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/gsoc/heap/debian unstable main
Please use unstable for now. Also make sure that you have a recovery
plan for your Debian/Hurd installation if anything goes wrong. For
your convenience there's a seed tarball containing packages with the
appropriate sources.list.d snippets and the repository key:
https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/gsoc/heap/debian/seed.tar
Currently
/hurd/console is not started (I'll add a init script for
that later), but for now you have to start a getty on the
console. Make sure that your
/etc/inittab contains a line like
this:
7:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 console
The patched
initscripts package contains the
runsystem.sysv file
and uses the Debian alternatives system to replace the
runsystem.gnu
variant. It also switches to the appropriate
halt and
reboot
utilities. If you install the package, you must use
halt-hurd or
reboot-hurd to halt or reboot the system. Running
halt or
reboot
is not harmful though, it just doesn't work.
So here I am. I've been coding for the Hurd for four weeks now, and
suddenly I'm the guy who wrote
umount. My point is, if you ever
wanted to work on an operating system, you might want to consider
working on the Hurd. It the Debian/Hurd port is very decent and
(according to #debian-hurds "Debian GNU/Hurd Doomsday-o-meter") 78.44%
of all Debian packages are available, so you've got a familiar
environment. Also, if your solution is right and your code is
reasonably clean, it is not that hard to get your changes
accepted. The list of
open issues is long and
might contain something that interests you. You could be the one
implementing a
read-ahead solution
to massively improve Hurds overall performance.
Also since Hurd is just a Hird of Unix replacing daemons running
on-top the GNU Mach microkernel, most of the functionality lies within
userspace processes. This makes the whole system very extensible and
quite easy to work with. For an overview over the Hurd, see
this page.
Next week I'll focus on improving my
mtab prototype, improving the
sysvinit patches and upstreaming the ones that are ready. As always,
in case I run out of stuff to do, I'll pick something from my
list of
issues, most likely the
network related issues.
In completely unrelated news, my Debian/Linux workstation died with a
kernel panic while I was writing this blog entry. It's a good thing
Emacs honors "save early, save often". M-x
insert-monolithic-kernel-rant-here.
This is it for this week, thanks for your attention :)
This weekend, Bernd Zeimetz organized a BSP at the offices of conova in Salzburg, Austria.
Three days of discussions, bugfixes, sparc removals and a lot of fun and laughter.
We squashed a total of 87 bugs: 66 bugs affecting Jessie/Sid were closed, 9 downgraded and 8 closed via removals. As people tend to care about (old)stable, 3 bugs were fixed in Wheezy and one in Squeeze. These numbers might be not totaly correct, as were kinda creative at counting Marga promised a talk about an introduction to properly counting bugs using the Haus vom Nikolaus algorithm to the base of 7 .
Speaking of numbers, I touched the following bugs (not all RC):
Here in the US, the Affordable Care Act is finally going into effect, with
accompanying drama. I managed to get signed up today at healthcare.gov.
After not having health insurance since 2000, I will finally be covered
starting January 1 2014.
Since my income is mosty 
Laurent Bigonville reported Debian