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[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011 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
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[[!tag stable_URL]]
* [[community/gsoc/project ideas/driver glue code]]
* [[open issues/user-space device drivers]]
* [[open issues/device drivers and io systems]]
---
The rump kernels provide existing real world drivers from netbsd.
Since [[DDE]] no longer seems like a promising approach to get drivers
for the Hurd, it appears that rump kernels are the best alternative.
It already does the hard work of providing an environment where the
foreign drivers can run, and offers the additional benefit of being
externally maintained. Rump also offers the necessary facilities for
running all drivers in separate userspace processes, which is more
desirable than drivers running in the microkernel.
A rump kernel is a minimal and portable NetBSD kernel running in
userspace. Rump kernels provide drivers for modern hard drives, sound
cards, usb support, and a TCP/IP stack. Instead of re-inventing and
maintaining drivers ourselves, we can re-use the existing NetBSD
drivers.
Hurd developers have enabled experimental support for modern hard
drives with a rump kernel. We call it rumpdisk, and you can try it in
the [[Debian GNU/Hurd image|hurd/running/qemu]].
As of May 2023, Hurd users are having good success with it in qemu
environments and some are using it on real hardware!
We do hope to use rump kernels for usb support, sound support (this
was working at some point), and possibly a new TCP/IP stack, but work
has not completed on those projects.
# Documentation
* <http://www.fixup.fi/misc/usenix-login-2015/login_oct15_02_kantee.pdf>
This is an an opinion paper that explains why operating systems need compartmentalized kernel drivers.
* <https://github.com/rumpkernel/wiki/wiki/Tutorial:-Getting-started>
A tutorial introduction for those interested in using and deploying rump kernels.
* <https://core.ac.uk/display/41816390>
"User space approach to audio device driving on UNIX-like systems" by Robert Millan Hernandez.
# Source Code
* <https://github.com/rumpkernel>
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