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What is the GNU Hurd?

The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. The Hurd 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).

What's new?

03 October 2002

Marcus Brinkmann speaks about the GNU Hurd at "Reflections | Projections 2002", the National Student ACM Conference at the University of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. The conference is held on October 18-20.

03 October 2002

A new article about the authentication server has been added to the web pages. It resembles the talk about the same topic which was given at the Libre Software Meeting, therefore the target audience is mostly programmers which want to learn about the details of authentication in the Hurd.

16 August 2002

The Hurd sources have stabilized again after a short period in which some of the interfaces were changed to prepare support of long files. All relevant filesystem and I/O interfaces have been modified to use 64 bit even on 32 bit systems. In light of the small and patient user base, we decided to drop backwards compatibility and replace the interfaces instead extending them. This means that the binaries of the Hurd, the C library, and some other programs need to be replaced manually, all at the same time, followed by a reboot. A detailed step-by-step procedure how to upgrade Debian GNU/Hurd is available on the Debian web site. People not using a binary distribution need to do a full manual bootstrap. It is recommended to treat this as a cross-compilation case.

31 July 2002

A new page has been added to the site, listing related projects. You can find it at the bottom of the menu.

22 June 2002

Various developers of the Hurd and people interested in it will meet at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux on July 9-13. Neal Walfield, who is working on porting the Hurd to the L4 microkernel, will give a presentation about L4, the people from HurdFr will give an introduction to the Hurd, and another presentation about the Hurd will be given by Marcus Brinkmann. There might be additional talks about the Hurd and related topics.

28 May 2002

We are pleased to announce version 1.3 of the GNU distribution of the Mach kernel, featuring advanced boot script support, support for large disks (>= 10GB) and an improved console.

This distribution is only for x86 PC machines. Volunteers interested in ports to other architectures are eagerly sought.

More information about GNU Mach 1.3 is available on the GNU Mach web page.

24 May 2002

Finally, the transition from the stdio-based GLibC Application Binary Interface (ABI) to the libio-based GLibC ABI has been completed. The Debian GNU/Hurd binary distribution has resumed building packages again, and everything should be back to normal. Note that we have also switched to GCC 3.1 as our default compiler. Thanks to everyone who helped in making all this possible, and our apologize for any inconvenience we have caused you.

18 May 2002

The "Linux and Unix User Group Heilbronn" (in Germany) is organizing a Debian GNU/Hurd installation party at 25 May 2002. In addition to that, Wolfgang Jährling will give a talk about usage of GNU/Hurd, common problems found in porting programs to GNU/Hurd and programming of extensions for the Hurd. It is a public event, so everyone is free to show up and participate.

05 May 2002

We are currently finishing the transition from a stdio-based GNU C Library (glibc) to a libio-based one. This is the result of about five months of work we put into getting the system ready and, of course, the work that the glibc developers did to make glibc what it is.

This change will have various advantages, for example libio has been tested more extensively, as it is also used by most GNU/Linux systems for some time now. However, it also means a change in the Application Binary Interface (ABI) of glibc, thus you will need to reinstall an existing Debian GNU/Hurd system. Upgrading has not been tested at all, so better do not expect it to work. Also note that you will need to get some of the Debian packages from alpha.gnu.org. Please read the recent mailing list archives for details.

Important Note: As another temporary complication, the current installation tarball is available at a different place than usual.

23 March 2002

Added The Hurd Hacking Guide to the documentation section. Thanks to Wolfgang Jährling for providing this introduction into GNU/Hurd and Mach programming!

08 March 2002

We are pleased to announce version 1.3 of the GNU distribution of the Mach 3.0 interface generator `MiG'. It may be found in the file http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mig/mig-1.3.tar.gz (about 145 KB compressed).

Diffs from version 1.2 are in http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mig/mig-1.2-1.3.diff.gz (about 6 KB compressed, 15 KB uncompressed). Relative to version 1.2, version 1.3 contains only some minor fixes.

You need this tool to compile the GNU Mach and Hurd distributions, and to compile GNU libc for the Hurd.

Bug reports relating to this distribution should be sent to bug-hurd@gnu.org. Requests for assistance should be made on help-hurd@gnu.org.

The md5sum checksum for this distibution is:

45c2b7456727d81dbd75f7152f8136fd mig-1.3.tar.gz

03 March 2002

There is a new mailing list called Hurd-devel-readers. It is the read-only version of Hurd-devel.

Hurd-devel is a mailing list for detailed discussions of design and implementation issues in the GNU Hurd; it is an internal low-volume list restricted to the core developers of the Hurd. While the web-based archive of Hurd-devel has always been public, the new mailing list Hurd-devel-readers provides a convenient way to follow the discussion of the Hurd experts.

If you are a recipient of Hurd-devel-readers and want to follow up on the discussion, please reply to the Bug-hurd mailing list.

Old news entries.