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[[!meta date="2009-12-03 11:00 UTC"]]

A month of the Hurd: initial work on *network device drivers in user space*,
*GRUB 2*. 
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[[!cut id="full_news" text="""
> This month [[Zheng Da|zhengda]], our [[former Google Summer of Code student
> working on network virtualization and some related
> topics|community/gsoc/2008]], published the code for the pcnet32 device
> driver that he had modified to run as a user-space process instead of inside
> the kernel, and posted some preliminary [performance benchmark
> results](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2009-11/msg00144.html).
> The test results are mostly on par with the in-kernel driver, so they show
> that moving the lower-layer parts of the networking stack, the device drivers
> themselves, into user space can be done without losing (much) performance.
> Given this encouraging start, work is going on to explore whether the [Device
> Driver Environment](http://wiki.tudos.org/DDE/DDEKit) that has been created
> for L4-based systems can be used for [providing GNU/Hurd systems with device
> drivers](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2009-11/msg00241.html)
> that (a) are more recent than our current ones, (b) support classes of
> devices that [[we don't support so
> far|microkernel/mach/gnumach/hardware_compatibility_list]], and (c) are
> running as (possibly separate, fault-isolated) user-space processes.

> Thanks to Samuel Thibault, the latest Debian GRUB 2 package (1.97+20091130-1)
> [supports native
> installation](http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2009/11/msg00095.html) from
> GNU/Hurd itself -- booting GNU/Hurd systems with GRUB has always been
> working, but until now it wasn't possible to *install* GRUB from a GNU/Hurd
> system.  GNU GRUB has originally been written [for booting GNU/Hurd
> systems](http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#History), so this
> step completes its original purpose.

> Samuel also continued to work on preparing the [[Xen branch of GNU
> Mach|microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports/xen]] for being merged with the mainline
> code, and he fixed a kernel panic in the kernel's floating point
> support code.
"""]]