What is the GNU Hurd?
The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux). More detailed.
What is the mission of the GNU Hurd project?
Our mission is to create a general-purpose kernel suitable for the GNU operating system, which is viable for everyday use, and gives users and programs as much control over their computing environment as possible. Our mission explained.
News
A month of the Hurd: Git migration, stand-alone libpthread and updated status. Details.
This month Thomas Schwinge finished migrating the main Hurd, GNU Mach, MIG, libpthread and unionfs to Git. You can find the new repositories at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/.
Also, he made libpthread buildable stand-alone by separating its build system from the Hurd's.
Additionally, Olaf Buddenhagen wrote a usability report about his experience with the GNU Hurd for everyday work.
Sergiu Ivanov will be working on unionmount translators during the Google Summer of Code 2009.
The application phase for the Google Summer of Code 2009 has already started. Please see our page about the GSoC for details of how to apply for your favorite Hurd project.
Neal Walfield has submitted a paper to EuroSys 2009 describing how resource management is done in viengoos:
Viengoos: A Framework for Stakeholder-Directed Resource Allocation.
General-purpose operating systems not only fail to provide adaptive applications the information they need to intelligently adapt, but also schedule resources in such a way that were applications to aggressively adapt, resources would be inappropriately scheduled. The problem is that these systems use demand as the primary indicator of utility, which is a poor indicator of utility for adaptive applications.
We present a resource management framework appropriate for traditional as well as adaptive applications. The primary difference from current schedulers is the use of stakeholder preferences in addition to demand. We also show how to revoke memory, compute the amount of memory available to each principal, and account shared memory. Finally, we introduce a prototype system, Viengoos, and present some benchmarks that demonstrate that it can efficiently support multiple aggressively adaptive applications simultaneously.
Samuel Thibault has implemented support for the PAE feature offered by modern x86 processors. This largely faciliates the deployment of GNU/Hurd systems running as a Xen domU on top of a standard Debian GNU/Linux Xen dom0, for example.
Read older news entries.
Contributing
To help the Hurd you can for example (from high level stuff to the inner core)
- Contribute to these web pages,
- Run a GNU/Hurd system and help others get their systems running,
- Port applications to work in Hurd,
- Write translators to extend the Hurd,
- Work on the Hurd on Mach, or
- Help to port the Hurd to a modern microkernel.
Read about ways to contribute in more detail.
Getting Help
There are a couple of different Hurd FAQs. There are a number of IRC channels and several different mailing lists with searchable archives.
Before asking a question on a mailing list or on IRC, first, please try to answer your own question using a search engine and reading the introductory information. If you have done this and you cannot find the answer to your question, feel free to ask on a mailing list or on IRC.
Running the Hurd
The most functional distribution of the Hurd is the one provided by Debian. Find more information about it at the Debian GNU/Hurd website.
Along with it there are various ways to run a GNU/Hurd system. Three of them are
- installing a GNU/Hurd distribution,
- running it in Xen and
- starting a Hurd qemu image or Hurd LiveCD.
And these web pages are a living proof of the usability of the Hurd, as they are rendered on a Debian GNU/Hurd system.
Current Status
There has not yet been an official 1.0 release. The Hurd is developed by a few volunteers in their spare time. The project welcomes any assistance you can provide. Porting and development expertise is still badly needed in many key areas.
Functional systems are installable in a dual-boot configuration. Development systems are currently mostly based on the Debian GNU/Hurd port sponsored by the Debian project.
Community resources for related projects focus around these pages, http://hurd.gnu.org/, the mailing lists and the IRC channels.
If you want to see the current discussions in the Hurd project, please have a look at the bug-hurd mailinglist archives.
For more details, please read our writeup on the current state of the GNU Hurd.
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