As of September 2024, the Hurd runs well on old Thinkpads. We recommend the Thinkpad T60, which supports a maximum of 4GB of RAM, and you can use an ?SSD. If you have difficulty installing the Hurd, then try setting your harddrive mode to "legacy" in the BIOS. A cheaper option is the T43 (2GB max RAM).

Other working Thinkpads include the X200, T400, or T500 Thinkpads, which support internet connectivity via the ethernet port. You can use an ?SSD on these laptops, which support a maximum of 8GB of RAM. The Debian installer images from 2023 fail to boot these machines, but you can install the Hurd via Debian's CrossInstall. Until we fix the libdiskfs/ext2fs issues on the 64 bit port, we recommend that you use the 32 bit version of the Hurd.

Other hardware that is known to work includes the Dell Inspiron 1750 on i386 Debian/Hurd. It won't boot with the current installer (June 2023 debian-hurd i386 net-install) because of an FPU issue (fixed upstream). I had to remove the optical drive. It hangs for one minute during boot on ACPI init, but otherwise fine when disabling full tree parsing. The touchpad, keyboard, display, ethernet, and the hard drive works (in legacy mode).

The Hurd can run on more recent Intel machines, but with no internet connectivity! You can always use the Hurd via qemu.

Currently, for disks Mach integrates old drivers from Linux through some driver glue code, which provide IDE disk support, and we have an AHCI driver which provides SATA support. ?Rumpdisk lets us use modern hard drives, like SSDs.

For network boards, we curently use the DDE toolkit to run linux 2.6.32 drivers in userland processes, which we may eventually replace with rump drivers. Note however that we have of course not tested all drivers. We obviously don't even have all kinds of hardware. So we can not promise that they will all work. What probably works for sure is what we usually use: the rtl8139 and e1000 drivers for instance. Firmware loading is not implemented yet.

For graphical mode, Xorg is supported, e.g. with the vesa driver. DRM is not supported yet. To run X then, you must use the proprietary BIOS, since coreboot/libreboot do not include a working vesa driver.

Hurd developers are working on adding USB support with ?rumpusbdisk.

Xen is also supported, both blkfront and netfront.