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36 Years in Making, GNU's Very Own Kernel Project Hurd is Anything But Dead

Better late than never!
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At this point, you might think that GNU Hurd is a mythical beast lost to time, but fret not, it's still around. Speaking at FOSDEM 2026, Samuel Thibault has provided a much-needed progress update.

To the uninitiated, GNU Hurd is a replacement for the Unix kernel, which has been in development since 1990. Unlike Linux's approach, where there's a monolithic kernel, Hurd breaks down components into small, independent servers.

This way, any changes or major redesigns can be carried out without having to rewrite the whole thing. You can draw a parallel with how tricky Linux's rustification has been.

Still Going Strong

It is now said to be rather stable, with Debian builds being able to compile about 80% of the archive, and GNOME, KDE, and Xfce all working on it. Guix has also shipped a Hurd release, with some work coming to Arch Linux and Alpine Linux as well.

On the software side, gcc, glibc, LLVM, and Rust have all added Hurd support upstream, with 64-bit support now working and a Debian amd64 version bootstrapped.

Similarly, on the hardware side, it supports SMP (multi-core), with SATA handled by an AHCI driver and USB drives and CDs supported through a userland translator.

Network drivers have also been ported to userland, replacing the old Linux 2.6.32-based layer. ACPI and PCI access both run in userland too, with PAE support on 32-bit added for memory-hungry builds.

There's KVM/Xen support too, but the performance for it is said to be "not satisfactory," and initial ARM64 support is in the works.

The included console is a modular one, with a server running virtual ttys and gettys and a client handling keyboard, mouse, and VGA. The VGA driver allows it to print kanji and emojis in text mode, with up to 512 dynamic glyphs and double-width character support.

Samuel also shared that:

The x86_64 port is essentially complete, which mostly required fixing the MIG RPC layer, and telling various software that it exists. To bootstrap the Debian GNU/Hurd x86_64 distribution, many of the crossbuilding, rebootstrapping and build profiles tools were used to make it relatively smooth.

Additionally, the Guix/Hurd distribution is also on its way, as well as an Alpine/Hurd distribution. And more to discover during the talk!

Via: Phoronix

About the author
Sourav Rudra

Sourav Rudra

A nerd with a passion for open source software, custom PC builds, motorsports, and exploring the endless possibilities of this world.

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