Since we entered a new year, we also entered a new quarter, and that means a new quarterly report from the Hurd, the project that aims to, to this day, developer a kernel for the GNU operating system. Over the course of the fourth quarter of 2025, an important undertaking has been to port dhcpcd to Hurd, which will ultimately bring IPv6 support to Hurd. For now, the port only supports IPv4, only works on Ethernet, and is still generally quite limited when it comes to its functionality. It’s a great start, though, and an amazing effort.
Furthermore, Q4 2025 also saw improvements in symmetric multiprocessing support on x86, not exactly a small feat. There’s a ton of work left to be done, but progress is being made and that’s important considering today’s processor landscape. There’s also the usual load of fixes, smaller improvements, and changes all over the operating system, and the report makes it clear that Debian’s recent announcement that APT will start requiring Rust is not a major issue for Hurd, as it already has a Rust port.
I started using Linux in 1993. And since then i’ve heard about Hurd “being worked on” or “making progress”. Sometimes even “big progress”.
I’m still not impressed.
@orzel
Indeed. I am already more impressed by Redox OS than I am with HURD. Redox OS is much more than just the kernel, and the project started 25 years later, and yet Redox OS is still further along. To top it off, HURD gets to piggy-back off both GNU Mach and Glibc while Redox is building all this as part of its project.L
We have been using Linux about the same amount of time. Well met.
Hurd. 36 years in the making and very little to show for it. At this point in time it is clear this microkernel is someone’s hobby plaything. At this pace, maybe it will be running on a 2025 machine a year before the heat death of the universe. GNU got lucky with Linux. I wish I could still get excited about Hurd news, but at this point in time Hurd is not an also ran but a no go.
Contrast this with Redox. Announced shy of 10 years ago and I can see me trying this out before 2030. If the FSF is serious about having their own kernel, they better start a new project from scratch and go for speed and usefulness. Hurd won’t deliver.
Your comment (and orzel’s as well) look like GNU Hurd still being actively developed is something that hurts whole OSS movement.
No, it doesn’t hurt (hurd?) anyone, but it is also a futile endeavor for anyone but the hobbyists wasting their time on this. Good for them, but I don’t need to know how they spend their time. After 36 years it’s clear that Hurd won’t deliver a useable kernel ever. Even ReactOS has more activity and achieves more than Hurd, while being a very slow project.
I guess what I am trying to say is this; report on Hurd when they reach version 1.1. Anything before is dead kernel walking.
And you’re requesting limiting such reports from from the site that has a name “osnews”.
I understand you might not be interested in some news that appearing here, but information about small and hobby OSes are published on Osnews since the beginning to this day on the regular basis. And for some reason, HURD frequently receives such rants, as it should close its development, or hide somewhere underground.
Even if in the beginning FSF had intended HURD to be a ‘proper’ replacement for UNIX kernel, and still endorses the project, it has s no longer the same goal, and any progress here comes not from the FSF attempts to ‘oust’ Linux, but from the fact that there are volunteers who are interested in doing this. It’s legitimate reason for them to work on it, and for Thom to inform us about Hurd.
And what information is that? Forever unfinished kernel is still unfinished? That is not news. That is par for the course. Of course Thom will report this non-news. Copy is copy. I just wonder if the 5 people (pulled from butt to signify the insignificance) still interested in this couldn’t get there “qoths” from the Hurd site themselves.
Also, I didn’t say it should shut down. Keep going until the universe ends. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t register on any level of significance. If the developers find it worth their time to work on it, yay, some people are happy. I’m just wondering why we find this perpetually behind the times project newsworthy at all? I expect to read in 15 years that Hurd managed to boot on a SiFive HiFive board. Milestone! And a new entry for RYF…
Nope, i’m a huge fan of “developping something for whatever reason if it suits me”. I hope they enjoy it.
But I dont see the point of articles along the line “someone commited a patch, hurd is not dead !”. It’s just noise. Not news.
@r_a_trip
A comment of mine just submitted that I wrote yesterday when there was only one comment on this story. The reason I am telling you is that I just read yours now and our comments overlap a lot and so mine looks a little foolish now.
To make this comment more useful, I will add that I am impressed by the ambition of Redox OS. Not only in terms of scope (who creates a COW filesystem for their barely working OS for example) but in the use cases they imagine. It is crazy and awesome that Jeremy Soller sees Redox as perhaps a better base for virtualization in the cloud than Linux for example. Chutzpah! I love it.
> GNU got lucky with Linux
To be fair, Linux got lucky with GNU too. If they had not come together when they did, the BSD lawsuit would have been settled and we would all be using FreeBSD. Even Linus has said that Linux may never have happened had he been aware of BSD.
The GNU Project itself never really got anywhere close to building an OS though. They made a compiler, a C library, some excellent utilities, and a ridiculously capable text editor (Emacs). GCC was probably the biggest contribution but Linux made glibc and the utils the de facto Open Source standard. The rise of Clang, UUtils, and musl are interesting. GNU may not be the Linux standard forever (though it probably will be as long as Red Hat backs it).
Of course, the FSF has been a lot more successful than just the strict definition of the GNU Project. You could argue though that the GPL and the FSF benefited from Linux even more than GNU. Both are famous and successful. The FSF has been able to claim credit for the Open Source ecosystem that surrounds Linux even though 2/3 of this software is non-GPL and the fact that the FSF and Linus Torvalds do not actually agree on licensing.