Cool to finally see some small silly tech stuff here that isn't trying to make money.
It seems Samuel Thibault is still there, sweet.<p>ps: some slides from earlier this year <a href="https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_software_bootstrapping/slides/267668/2026-02-0_u3q2sgt.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on...</a><p>full vid here <a href="https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_software_bootstrapping/" rel="nofollow">https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnu...</a>
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.
Mach's problem wasn't that it had slow IPC, but rather that in terms of microkernels, Mach was pretty damn big.<p>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.
Is that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?
Yes, you want to do more IPC, its basically linear with the increase in performance. So the amount of overhead stays the same basically. At least in IPC benchmarks and those tend to be important.<p>Making that fast is fundamental to any OS.
Isn't it even worse now? The faster computers get, the more that software-induced bottlenecks hurt.
I could see just powering through because modern hardware is fast enough to do so being an option.<p>Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.
What even is a 20% delta in performance? Like a five year old difference in hardware design.<p>If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.
If anything, Mach style IPC has gotten worse because of the greater overhead if kernel/user transitions. Spectre really did a number on context switching overhead.
People lost their shit when Spectre mitigations added 20% overhead to kernel calls though. Why wouldn't they do the same for microkernel overhead?
I'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ).<p>I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
Is there reason to think they've addressed them?
Lets get to a usable feature set before optimization.
> 9pfs for the Hurd<p>From the wiki:<p>> 9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS<p>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 hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.
Instead of rewriting Bun, maybe Anthropic should have thrown some tokens at finishing Hurd.
I hold out hope for (human) work to coalesce on creating a stable/secure microkernel (SeL4 anybody???) and getting it mature enough to build an OS on.<p>Once that is done, <i>then</i> you build out the absolutely massive collection of userspace drivers that would be needed to replace linux by leveraging LLMs and other automated techniques. The good part is that by keeping the drivers in userspace, the security risk of generative techniques for driver development is pretty low.
We'd have to name it Turd then.
Relevant xkcd: <a href="https://xkcd.com/1508/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1508/</a>
Fun fact: Duke Nukem Forever shipped before GNU Hurd.
Nah, Claude will finish it over night
Hurd will have its day once Linux makes it on the desktop :-)
While I upvoted this, as being true for the general population, for me Linux has made it on the desktop (and laptop) much more than 2 decades ago, around 2003, when the remaining problems that had forced me to use dual-booting with Windows had been solved (i.e. when it became possible in Linux to play movies, read DVDs and use TV tuners). When that happened, I wiped out Windows from my computers.<p>If you have a pro to help you, already for a long time Linux has been fine on the desktop for anyone. My parents, over 80 years old, have used Linux on their PCs for many years, and they did not even know what "Linux" is. That was possible because I installed and configured for them the operating system and all the applications they needed for reading and writing documents, Internet browsing, e-mail, music listening and movie watching etc.<p>Windows is easy only because it comes preinstalled. I have installed Windows at work on many kinds of computers and during installation I have encountered much more problems impossible to solve for a non-expert than when installing Linux.
Linux has made it to the desktop, packaged inside VMs served by Apple, Microsoft and Google.
That's not really what everyone means.<p>However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction
This should be a lesson about providing a product versus providing a technology.<p>Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a gamebox." Of course, people don't actually want gameboxes either - they want to play games - but it's a few steps closer.
No, but that is what they will ever get from OEMs selling PCs at computer stores used by normies.<p>Also lets not forget those distros play Windows games, because hardly any studio bothers with native Linux games.
It just...has made it. Plenty of power users just use it as their primary OS. I think official figures under-estimate it because many people daily-driving will spoof user agents of other OSes.<p>And there's Android.
Ah, Android, with a userspace based on Java, Kotlin, C and C++ standard libraries, Android native APIs, without anything related to GNU/Linux, unless it is a rooted device, or one gets to package a full Linux userspace as an APK, which isn't fully compatible due to security enforcement mechanisms.<p>I would look into those statistics regarding desktop world wide adoption, distribution per OS.
People using Linux in 1992 would say something similar to people using any of the current flavours of Linux.
Anyone who wants it can have Termux which gives you a full Linux experience under Android with GNU tools if you want it, though.
No it does not.<p>It gives a Linux experience within the security sandbox from Android, which is why there are limitations when using it on regular devices, via PlayStore.<p>Also it requires working around the NDK limitations on available POSIX APIs.
Oh come on. :-)<p>Linux is not userspace. Linux is a kernel, and android is a parallel fork of the kernel. So android is a version of linux but is not GNU/Linux.<p>Android/Linux, if you will. We dont have to be shy this.
Yeah, exactly because of that, lets not do victory laps for a kernel.<p>GNU/Linux, the Linux desktop, has zero relevance on Android.<p>No one, not a single person, buying Android tablets and phones at places like MediaMarkt, cares about GNU/Linux Desktop.<p>They care about what apps via PlayStore, Samsung, Huawei and Xiomi stores, they can use, just like all normies.
As a sign in the window of a tiny shop in my quiet suburb says "Laptop and phone repairs - Windows, Linux and MacOS". If that doesn't count, I don't know what else could.
Linux hit 10% desktop usage recently
Not really, that was a fluke, still below 10%, although getting closer with 7.53%.<p><a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide" rel="nofollow">https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide</a>
Eric S. Raymond opines that now that Microsoft makes its profits mainly from Azure, some product owner in Microsoft will be allowed to enshittify Windows for collection short-term profit, thus paving way for Linux on the desktop.<p><a href="https://x.com/esrtweet/status/2084605702203424896" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/esrtweet/status/2084605702203424896</a>
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.
> I plan to build bootable images and boot
the kernel on Apple M1<p>GuixSD with GNU Hurd would be a really fun way to repurpose an old MBP.
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.<p>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.
Tales from the crypt.
Someone should do the blasphemous thing and have Opus 5 finish HURD.<p>Actually in all seriousness reviving dead interesting FOSS projects is one use for AI coding I've thought about.
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!
Wow.