The GNU project has released GNU Hurd 0.9, GNU Mach 1.8, and GNU MIG 1.8. Hurd has been in development for a long time, and is supposed to – eventually – be the official kernel for the GNU operating system, a role currently unofficially filled by the Linux kernel. GNU Mach is a little bit different.
GNU Mach is the GNU distribution of the Mach microkernel, upon which a GNU Hurd system is based. The microkernel provides an Inter Process Communication (IPC) mechanism that the Hurd uses to define interfaces for implementing in a distributed multi-server fashion the services a traditional operating system kernel provides.
Quote: “Hurd has been in development for a long time, and is supposed to – eventually – be the official kernel for the GNU operating system […]”
Well, if we take a look to their website [1], one can read there this:
“Defunct GNU/Hurd distributions:
[…]
GNU”
So, it will be for the “active” Debian, or “alpha” Arch and Nix…
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/running/distrib.html
Not quite. It is not the official Debian kernel, they just maintain a version of Debian that uses it, but that’s not the Debian that anybody in the real world uses.
Also it is constrained to 32bit CPUs. That’s a pretty bit cross to bear. The world has left 32bits behind.
Give ’em 25 years and three rewrites and I’m sure they can make it work on 64bit CPU’s.
By this time everybody will question you about what is a CPU anyway.
The other big issue is that the have almost no drivers for modern hardware. Last time I checked, (about 2 releases ago), they didn’t have any NIC drivers that worked in virtualbox, and you had to use one of the odd NIC emulations in QEMU to get it tor work there.
I would love to see Hurd actually work on modern hardware (the whole sub-hurd thing is better sandboxing than almost anything else today can provide), but their architecture is just wierd and they have near zero developers. L4 is dominating the embedded microkernel market, and most of the people who care about microkernel research are working on MINIX 3 (which has some similar issues like being 32-bit only), so I doubt that Hurd is going anywhere any time soon.
Does Hurd even support “Hello, Word” yet?