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[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2011, 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
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
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]]."]]"""]]
[[!tag faq/support]]
[[!meta title="Doing a GNU/Hurd System Port"]]
How difficult is it to port the GNU/Hurd system to run on another architecture?
The GNU/Hurd system consists of [[/Hurd]] servers running as user-space
processes on top of the [[GNU Mach|microkernel/mach/gnumach]] microkernel. The
system functionality is usually accessed through the
[[POSIX|posix_compatibility]] interface that is provided by [[/glibc]] and
[[/libpthread]].
A whole-system port involves touching all these components, with varying
degree, of course. In 2024, Sergey Bugaev completed an experimental
system port to AArch64, so be sure to consult him, if you are
considering a system port.
For a CPU architecture port, the microkernel is the most involved part,
followed by glibc and the threading library.
The original [[microkernel/Mach]] microkernel was portable to a number of
architectures which were a lot more popular at the beginning of the 1990s than
they are now.
The Debian GNU/Hurd system is currently available for the x86 and
X86_64 architectures and it is probably the most up-to-date with about
70% of Debian's packages available. There also exists an experimental
GNU/Hurd AArch64 port. Contact Sergey if you are interested in running
the Hurd on AArch64. You can also run the Hurd with emulators such as
[[hurd/running/QEMU]] (or KVM), or [[hurd/running/VirtualBox]].
Besides this, there is a port for the [[Xen
domU|microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports/xen]] *sub-architecture*. With
Xen, you can run the Hurd and GNU/Linux in parallel. If you are
already running Guix System, then
[[childhurds|https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Virtualization-Services]]
are probably the easiest way to try out the Hurd.
Further on, there are some [[unfinished porting
attempts|microkernel/mach/gnumach/ports]] for the Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC
architectures. These have not been completed due to little developer interest.
Another option is to do the port at a different layer: port the Hurd servers to
not run on the GNU Mach microkernel, but instead on top of [[another
microkernel|which_microkernel]]. Or, even by providing a Mach emulation layer
on top of a monolithic kernel. For example, there could be a port for [[having
Mach run as a POSIX user-space process|open_issues/mach_on_top_of_posix]], or
by implementing the [[Mach IPC|microkernel/mach/ipc]] facility (as well as
several others) as Linux kernel modules. While there have been some
experiments, no such port has been completed yet.
# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2013-09-05
<rah> what would be required to port the hurd to sparc?
<pinotree> port gnumach, write the sparc bits of mach/hurd in glibc, and
maybe some small parts in hurd itself too
<rah> what would be required to port gnumach? :-)
<braunr> a new arch/ directory
<braunr> bootstrap code
<braunr> pmap (mmu handling) code
<braunr> trap handling
<braunr> basic device support (timers for example)
<braunr> besides, sparc is a weird beast
<braunr> so expect to need to work around tricky issues
<braunr> in addition, sparc is dead
<rah> mmm
<rah> it's not totally dead
<rah> the T1 chips and their decendents are still in production
<rah> the thing is I'd like to have real hardware for the hurd
<rah> and if I'm going to have two machines running at once, I'd rather one
of them was my UltraSPARC box :-)
<braunr> rah: unless you work hard on it, it's unlikely you'll get it
<rah> braunr: of course
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