Hello! Welcome to a new qoth. This qoth covers new and interesting GNU/Hurd developments in Q2 of 2024!

Sergey Bugaev committed public headers for the GNU Mach AArch64 port. He writes that

...there is now a real port of GNU Mach to AArch64, using these headers as its actual API/ABI. We got the Mach port to run glibc, several Hurd servers, and simple Unix programs, including things like fork/exec and signal delivery & handling working, which exercises these architecture-specific definitions (thread state & exceptions). We have also managed to do some testing on real hardware; although not everything is working yet, we have seen thread state manipulation & Mach handling an unaligned SP fault work as expected.

His email also mentions that the GCC patches that enable GCC to compile GNU/Hurd programs on AArch64 have been merged! This apparently will make it easier to merge his AArch64 specific glibc patches.

He also added new tests to check that threads handle signals well, and he also fixed a use-after-free in vmmappageable_scan(). He also hosted a lengthy Hurd code jam (apologies for the poor audio quality).

He also very notably added support to copy a send once right to Mach and MIG.

Some time ago, Sergey also wrote the terrible-mdns-responder, and if you would like to be able to type in ssh HOSTNAME.local and connect to a locally running Hurd, then you may want to try it!

Flávio Cruz fixed some issues with the Hurd compiling on GCC 14.

Luca Dariz fixed message sizes, where the size was not set by userspace, and he added another test to check message sizes on various code paths.

Debian GNU/Hurd now offers an experimental SMP GNU Mach kernel (32-bit only) and the official rustc compiler! Now that we have ported rustc to Debian GNU/Hurd, we can compile important packages like librsvg. Debian GNU/Hurd now can compile 71% of the packages from the Debian archive.

Now for something trivial but fun! I updated the guide on the Hurd wiki that shows how one can run their own personal ext2fs translator.

You could go crazy even! Why not make something like this:

 ~/silly <--> silly.fs
    |   \
    |    \
    |     \
    |      \
    |       \
   \|/       \/
  silly1 <-> silly1.fs
        ...

 /hurd/joshua/silly/silly1/silly2/silly3/silly4

Each sillyN is another ext2fs filesystem! Make sure that as N gets bigger sillyN.fs gets smaller. Let us know in the #hurd irc channel how "silly" you are.

The current record is ~/silly1/silly2 where each sillyN is a different ext2fs. Does anyone want to volunteer to beat the current record?

So if you want to test if your favorite packages work on the Hurd and contribute towards making the full GNU system usable for a wider range of people, please check the contributing page.

The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux). More detailed.

GNU Mach is the microkernel upon which a GNU Hurd system is based. It 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. More detailed.