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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).

If you have any news related to the Hurd project, feel free to send a news entry to web-hurd@gnu.org so that it can be added here.

What's new?

14 January 2007

Neal Walfield and Marcus Brinkmann have written and submitted for publication A Critique of the GNU Hurd Multi-server Operating System and a position paper Improving Usability via Access Decomposition and Policy Refinement. Please follow the two preceding links to see the complete announcements. The authors welcome comments and discussion which may be directed to the <bug-hurd@gnu.org> mailing list for the Critique and to the <l4-hurd@gnu.org> mailing list for the position paper.

The abstract of the Critique:

The GNU Hurd's design was motivated by a desire to rectify a number of observed shortcomings in Unix. Foremost among these is that many policies that limit users exist simply as remnants of the design of the system's mechanisms and their implementation. To increase extensibility and integration, the Hurd adopts an object-based architecture and defines interfaces, which, in particular those for the composition of and access to name spaces, are virtualizable.

This paper is first a presentation of the Hurd's design goals and a characterization of its architecture primarily as it represents a departure from Unix's. We then critique the architecture and assess it in terms of the user environment of today focusing on security. Then follows an evaluation of Mach, the microkernel on which the Hurd is built, emphasizing the design constraints which Mach imposes as well as a number of deficiencies its design presents for multi-server like systems. Finally, we reflect on the properties such a system appears to require.

The abstract of the position paper:

Commodity operating systems fail to meet the security, resource management and integration expectations of users. We propose a unified solution based on a capability framework as it supports fine grained objects, straightforward access propagation and virtualizable interfaces and explore how to improve resource use via access decomposition and policy refinement with minimum interposition. We argue that only a small static number of scheduling policies are needed in practice and advocate hierarchical policy specification and central realization.

7 January 2007

A number of GNU Hurd developers will again (as already in the previous years) meet at the time of the FOSDEM 2007, which will take place from 2007-02-24 to 25 in Brussels, Belgium. This wiki page has some details. Contact us if you are interested in meeting with us.

27 April 2006

The GNU Hurd project will participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, under the aegis of the GNU project.

The following is a list of items you might want to work on. If you want to modify or extend these tasks or have your own ideas what to work on, please feel invited to contact us on the bug-hurd mailing list or the #hurd IRC channel.

• Make GNU Mach use more up to date device drivers.
• Work on GNU Mach's IPC / VM system.
• Design and implement a sound system.
• Transition the Hurd libraries and servers from cthreads to pthreads.
• Find and implement a reasonable way to make the Hurd servers use syslog.
• Design and implement libchannel, a library for streams.
• Rewrite pfinet, our interface to the IPv4 world.
• Implement and make the Hurd properly use extended attributes.
• Design / implement / enhance support for the...
  • Andrew File System (AFS);
  • NFS client and NFSd;
  • EXT3 file system;
  • Logical Volume Manager (LVM).

Please see the page GNU guidelines for Summer of Code projects about how to make an application and Summer of Code project ideas list for a list of tasks for various GNU projects and information about about how to submit your own ideas for tasks.

Old news entries.