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[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]

[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
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any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]

[[!meta date="2019-01-01 22:22 UTC"]]

Hello!  Welcome to a new qoth.  This qoth covers new and interesting GNU/Hurd
developments in Q4 of 2018!
[[!if test="included()" then="""[[!toggle id=full_news
text="Details."]][[!toggleable id=full_news text="[[!paste id=full_news]]"]]"""
else="
[[!paste id=full_news]]"]]

[[!cut id="full_news" text="""


Joan Lledó completed a PCI Arbiter for the GNU/Hurd, and Damien Zammit helped
[[polish |http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00033.html]]
[[it|https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2018-November/057677.html]].
This is a significant development and accomplishment!  PCI stands for Peripheral
Component Interconnect, and it is a standard that allows many computer
peripherals to communicate together with the rest of the system smoothly.  Of
course, the GNU/Hurd intends to take this further by allowing ordinary users to
safely access PCI cards!  You can learn more about it in Samuel [[fosdem
talk|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpqTnLD8ZJ8]].
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-10/msg00029.html]]


Joan Lledo` updated the GNU/Hurd lwip translator to work with the latest lwip.
As a reminder lwip is a lightweight TCP/IP networking stack.  The GNU/Hurd lwip
translator provides a complete replacement to GNU/Hurd's pfinit.
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00062.html]]

Damien Zammit created an ACPI translator.  This translator provides a translator
for mounting x86 ACPI tables under a path as read-only files.  It is needed so
that other things that depend on ACPI to find the base address such as Intel's
IOMMU (DMAR table), memory mapped PCI space (MCFG table) etc, can be discovered
in userspace.  Otherwise, this functionality would need to be built into gnumach
which would be a burden to maintain.
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00049.html]]

Damien Zammit worked on allowing libstore to open non-mach devices, which is in
preparation for rump kernel disk access.
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-12/msg00050.html]]

Samuel Thibault allowed non-privileged users to mount their own tmpfs.  It turned
out to be a permission issue and a trivial fix.
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00012.html]]

Samuel fixed a bfs issue with /proc not properly mounting.
[[https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2018/10/msg00007.html]]

Samuel Thibault enabled LLVM to support the Hurd.  This can hopefully pave the
way to use LLVM sanitizers on the existing GNU/Hurd codebase.
[[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Hurd-LLVM-Clang]]

Work toward porting Rust and Go to the GNU/Hurd is ongoing:
[[https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2018/11/msg00020.html]]

Svante Signell worked on adding POSIX file record locking support.
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00058.html]]
[[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2016-12/msg00047.html]]


So if you want to test if your favorite packages work on the Hurd and
contribute towards making the full GNU system usable for a wider range
of people, please [[get in contact|contact_us]] -- and maybe already
grab the [[source code|source_repositories]].

---

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|hurd/documentation]].

**GNU Mach** is the microkernel upon which a GNU Hurd system is based.  It
provides an Inter Process Communication (IPC) mechanism that the Hurd uses to
define interfaces for implementing in a distributed multi-server fashion the
services a traditional operating system kernel provides.  [[More
detailed|microkernel/mach/gnumach]].

"""]]