Next year will be the year of GNU Hurd, as well as
The Desktop Linux Year and people really using
HaikuOS on real hardware for years. You read it here
first!
Ha I just booted Haiku on my desktop yesterday and it ran surprisingly well. Kind of took me back to 2001. If Firefox is stable on it I actually probably could switch from Windows (my needs are pretty simple at home).
Does anyone more familiar with Hurd know how they addressed performance issues encountered by other Mach-based kernels? I remember reading that one of Mach's bottlenecks was validating that each IPC message had proper permissions/access when sending them between processes due to the large number and frequency of messages.
Most RTOS for high integrity computing deployments are microkernel based, and the large majority of cloud deployments are running on top of microkernels, which is basically what a type 1 hypervisor ends up being, even more so, if it they are serverless workloads running directly on top of the hypervisor.
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones...
...PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks...
This entire site is a propaganda piece for one of the largest incubators in tech. Just because it has “hacker” in the name doesn’t mean it represents tech.
Like, the point is tech making money. You’re in the wrong place if you’re looking for something other than that.
I wish that there was one day where I could log in and just feel like I was on the HN that existed when I first got my account. A day with a moratorium on all posting about LLMs, LLM startups, generative AI, just actual Hacker News, i.e. news which is interesting to hackers, and not a compendium of every terrible antisocial Bay Area echo chamber idea being sold as humanity's savior by narcissists with God complexes.
> 9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS
How is it not robust? What metric did they use? Fault tolerance is not explained here so I don't know what they mean by this. You can use aan(8) on 9front which runs on each side of the connection and holds it open if the network breaks, then resume on reconnect.
I can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical.
I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.
There was a brief period about 10 years back where there was a sudden burst of activity on Hurd, but that started to dwindle shortly afterwards. Alas, it is like Fusion power, always moving forwards but under funded to get it across the line into something more.
For every year development Hurd moves forward, so does everyone else's, only the they have much more resources.
23 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadps: some slides from earlier this year https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on...
full vid here https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnu...
GuixSD with GNU Hurd would be a really fun way to repurpose an old MBP.
Like, the point is tech making money. You’re in the wrong place if you’re looking for something other than that.
From the wiki:
> 9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS
How is it not robust? What metric did they use? Fault tolerance is not explained here so I don't know what they mean by this. You can use aan(8) on 9front which runs on each side of the connection and holds it open if the network breaks, then resume on reconnect.
Actually in all seriousness reviving dead interesting FOSS projects is one use for AI coding I've thought about.
My guess is that the GNU/HURD people are doing a lot of novel work that doesn't yet exist.
I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.
For every year development Hurd moves forward, so does everyone else's, only the they have much more resources.
That said, if there's a resurgence in microkernel, it will probably come from the Rust community.