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  • I would love GNU Hurd to succeed.

    That said, if there's a resurgence in microkernel, it will probably come from the Rust community.

    by farfatched
  • I agree. Operating systems have become too fast.
    by JAlexoid
  • 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!
    by shevy-java
  • 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).
    by 800xl
  • Tales from the crypt.
    by pshirshov
  • The D compiler port to Hurd is very interesting
    by fithisux
  • Someone should do the blasphemous thing and have Opus 5 finish HURD.

    Actually in all seriousness reviving dead interesting FOSS projects is one use for AI coding I've thought about.

    by api
  • Are AIs good enough at doing novel work that they have yet to encounter?

    My guess is that the GNU/HURD people are doing a lot of novel work that doesn't yet exist.

    by 0xpgm
  • 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.

    by shaggie76
  • It’s like farmer’s market craft fair tech. Same vibes.

    Last neckbeards standing?

    by browningstreet
  • 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.

    by ColdStream
  • I hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.
    by sirsinsalot
  • First there will be the Desktop Linux of the year breakthrough. Evil folks say it will coincide with the end of the world via a total global catastrophy but these people don't understand beauty - such as TempleOS, the most perfect OS of all times.
    by shevy-java
  • Nah, Claude will finish it over night
    by thomasahle
  • Next year will be the year of Hurd on the desktop, I am sure of it.
    by voxelghost
  • Hurd will have its day once Linux makes it on the desktop :-)
    by lynx97
  • Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1508/
    by achyudh
  • Fun fact: Duke Nukem Forever shipped before GNU Hurd.
    by EarlKing
  • Instead of rewriting Bun, maybe Anthropic should have thrown some tokens at finishing Hurd.
    by this_user
  • > I plan to build bootable images and boot the kernel on Apple M1

    GuixSD with GNU Hurd would be a really fun way to repurpose an old MBP.

    by isityettime
  • My M1 is currently running Guix on Fedora, I would love to see this!
    by AloysB
  • > 9pfs for the Hurd

    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.

    by MisterTea
  • 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.
    by csb6
  • Lets get to a usable feature set before optimization.
    by ZiiS
  • 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.
    by pjmlp
  • Is there reason to think they've addressed them?
    by glhaynes
  • Is that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?
    by floxy
  • Mach's problem wasn't that it had slow IPC, but rather that in terms of microkernels, Mach was pretty damn big.

    There are some very fast microkernels out there, like the L4 family, which negate the IPC overhead of microkernels by being small enough to fit entirely in the L2 cache of most processors. Linux may only have the single IPC call per round trip, but it's a fucking huge kernel and there is typically a ton of cache thrashing going on.

    by darksaints
  • It seems Samuel Thibault is still there, sweet.

    ps: 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...

    by jnpnj
  • Cool to finally see some small silly tech stuff here that isn't trying to make money.
    by inigyou