GNU Hurd information

There is now an Official GNU Hurd web page as part of the GNU web pages Future changes, updates, &c. will go there.

The Hurd is the GNU operating system. What follows are all the salient bits of info regarding the Hurd (that I know of).

There is an increasing amount of activity going on out there and it's getting very difficult for me to keep up with all of it. So, please, if you have any relevant information, corrections, &c. let me know!

Many thanks to Teddy Hogeborn for the icon.

General Information

• Towards a New Strategy of OS Design. This paper also appeared in The January 1994 GNU's Bulletin
• The new Unofficial GNU Hurd FAQ. The old Unofficial GNU Hurd FAQ is still around. The two have no overlapping material (yet?).
• The Hurd has been mentioned twice in "the press" (I am not sure which was "first")
  • A letter to Byte magazine about the GNU Hurd written by Todd Hutchinson.
  • An article in UNIXopen about GNU Hurd (among other FSF things) (listing of articles) written by Martin Michlmayr.
• Task list (from the latest snapshot)
• The meaning of name "Hurd"
• The GNU Hurd Interfaces manual (draft from the snapshot)
• There are (or will be) Two mailing lists for the Hurd, bug-hurd@prep.ai.mit.edu and help-hurd@prep.ai.mit.edu. The former is intended for bug reports, and the latter is intended for requests for assistance. Send mail to bug-hurd-request@prep.ai.mit.edu or help-hurd-request@prep.ai.mit.edu to request being placed on either mailing list. I don't know if these will be gated to newsgroups...
• Why develop another free OS? mib's response on gnu.misc.discuss.
• Some discussion of processes migration with the Hurd. Some of the Mach research at University of Utah is also relevant.
• Several messages about the filesystem organization of the Hurd

The Software

• The Hurd sources
• The binary snapshot of the entire system

Technical Information

Several people (besides the FSF :) have managed to get the Hurd running. (now that the alpha release is out, this section is probably of little interest)

• Gordon Matzigkeit got the Hurd running by compiling a snapshot and all the tools. He has a web page documenting how he did it.
• I am part of a local Hurd group working toward getting the Hurd running, and doing further work/exploration when we do so. We have made some progress so I will start maintaining a page with our current status. (We haven't gotten together for a while, so this page is quite out of date)
• Erich Boleyn is part of our local group, and has several ideas for the Hurd including an elaborate exec server and an emulation system He is also working on a new boot mechanism for multi-server systems, GRUB.

Current and Past Announcements

These are all the announcements made over the years. Most of them were either to gnu.announce or to the hurd-ann mailing list (which is now gone).

• The much awaited ALPHA RELEASE is out! Aug 96
• Alpha release status (Jul 96) (ongoing "unofficial" status messages will be appended to this file.)
• Binary image available, Apr 96 -- This and NetBSD boot flopies should be enough to get a working Hurd system!
• New Snapshot, Apr 96 -- NFS and lots else works!
• News Flash, Nov 95 -- ftp works!
• New Snapshot, Jul 95 -- ext2fs support
• New Snapshot, Apr 95
• News flash, Nov 94
• News flash, Sep 94 -- gcc runs!
• News flash, Aug 94
• News flash, Jul 94 -- emacs runs!
• News flash, May 94
• News flash, Apr 94 -- it boots!
• GNU HURD announcement, Nov 93
• GNU HURD announcement, May 91

Other stuff and related projects

• Lites: A free Mach single server, based on BSD 4.4 Lite. A more recent version is available from the Mach4 people (q.v.)
• Mach 4. The Hurd uses this as its kernel. Hoever, Utah is dropping Mach for their research, and instead writing their own microkernel called Fluke
• CMU CS Project Mach Home Page
• OSF Operating Systems Collected Papers
• Linux on the OSF Microkernel
• Linux Single-Server project (currently on hold?)
• Archive of the Hurd-folks mailing list
  This mailing list started in May 91 and was mostly a OS religious war, with a few interesting bits. It is about 300K, so you don't want to grab it lightly.

29 Aug 96 trent

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