GNU Hurd
 
Installation
Getting Help
Source Code
Development
History
 
GNU Mach
 
Installation
Source Code
 
GNU MIG
 
Source Code

What's old?

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.

02 March 2006

Added a Slovak translation of What's New by Peter Kotrcka.

08 February 2006

Added a Turkish translation of Towards a New Strategy of OS Design by Oktay Poçan.

02 October 2005

Added Polish translations of What's New, GNU Hurd, GNU Mach, and GNU MIG by Andrzej Zaborowski.

20 September 2005

Material from the Operating System topic during the Libre Software Meeting which took place this summer is available online. Included are slides and recordings of talks by Marcus Brinkmann and Neal Walfield about the Hurd/L4 port.

22 August 2005

Added Esperanto translations of too many pages to list by Ludovic Courtès.

29 July 2005

Added a Italian translation of GNU Hurd by Carlo Palma.

26 July 2005

Added Dutch translations of What's New and GNU Hurd by Roan Embrechts.

28 January 2005

Marcus Brinkmann added a small web page describing the ongoing developments on the Hurd-to-L4 port.

21 August 2003

Added a link to Patrick Strasser's the Hurd Source Code Cross Reference in all the "Source code" sections.

16 July 2003

GNU/LinuxTag 2003 is now over and since there was a talk given about the Hurd, a demo GNU/Hurd machine running and the sale of Hurd t-shirts, Wolfgang Jährling decided to write a short summary of what happened there. Many thanks to Wolfgang Jährling, Volker Dormeyer and Michael Banck!

2 July 2003

The tarball for Debian GNU/Hurd that Marcus Brinkmann made over the years has been discontinued in favour of Jeff Bailey's crosshurd package. To install Debian GNU/Hurd from now on, this package should be used. Another Debian system is required to be installed on the same machine. The GNU/Hurd installation guide has not been updated yet.

14 February 2003

The GNU/Hurd User's Guide is now accessible through the Documentation section of the Hurd web pages.

18 January 2003

Gaël Le Mignot, president of HurdFr, presented the GNU Hurd on 22 November 2002 at EpX in Paris. English slides and French slides of the talk are also available.

18 November 2002

For one month now, the pthread implementation by Neal Walfield is part of the Hurd CVS source tree, and has been used to compile more software for the Debian GNU/Hurd archive. The lack of a POSIX compatible thread library (the Hurd was based on the cthread implementation that originally accompanied Mach) was a show stopper, and we are happy about the possibility to not only compile more applications, but also to start the work on migrating the Hurd source code to pthreads.

19 October 2002

The Toronto Hurd Users Group meets again: The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club will be hosting talks on the GNU Hurd on October 26 by Marcus Brinkmann and Neal Walfield. There will also be a GnuPG keysigning before Marcus's talk. Please email Ryan Golbeck your GnuPG key so he can get everyone setup.

Marcus will talk about the Hurd interfaces. Neal will talk about about A GNU Approach to Virtual Memory Management in a Multiserver Operating System

Date: 26 Oct 2002

Time: 1330 (1:30pm EST) and 1500 (3:00pm EST)

Place: University of Waterloo, Math and Computers building, room MC 2066

More information can be found at UW CS Club website and at thug@gnu.org

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.

18 February 2002

Pro-Linux has published a GNU/Hurd status report (in German). They will infrequently publish updates in the future.

19 January 2002

The Toronto Hurd User Group meets: The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club will be hosting a talk on the Hurd and the Debian GNU/Hurd operating system. There will also be a gpg keysigning and installfest for GNU/Hurd following the talk. All are welcome, and gpg keys are not required.

Date: 26 Jan 2002

Time: 1400 (2pm EST)

Place: University of Waterloo, Math and Computers building, room 3001 (comfy lounge).

More information about this event at thug@gnu.org

19 January 2002

Added a subsection about the ChangeLogs.

13 January 2002

An interview with Marcus Brinkmann was published by Pro-Linux (the interview is in German).

11 January 2002

Added a section called `What's new'.