Hello, below are incomplete answers to your questions and some links. Many facts are supplied by Samuel Thibault, the main GNU/Hurd developer. Since he is very busy, he does not want to reply directly due to lack of time to answer any follow-up questions.
Thanks! On Tue, 2019-11-12 at 10:44 +0200, Alexander Vdolainen wrote: > Hi, > IMO GNU Hurd is a good thing to have, btw at the moment Hurd architecture > isn't so good: > - it's a microkernel, isn't it? if so, why mach still contains drivers ... We're working on this, precisely. The most promising is usage of rump kernel drivers, from NetBSD, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel. Very soon these drivers will be supported in Hurd. > why not to use a 3rd microkernel generation ... etc ... Why doing it? This has been done in the past, it's a lot of work, while we can on the contrary shrink Mach instead. > - MIG ... it's an ugly thing Frankly, like all RPC designs. Newer ones have a nice red package, but in the end the issues will always be the same. > as I understood GNU hurd development has stalled due to the different > reasons, but one of them is architecture itself. Not really, it's the fact that yes it's more complex to make non-monolithic designs, and thus people prefer to go work on Linux, and only cry when they happen to want to do containers. Very soon now, Gnumach+Hurd will also have SMP support. Regarding 64-bit support 64bit userland is not planned for, but 64-bit kernelland has made a lot of progress, see https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/64-bit.html. > To change this a lot of work is required, but nobody wants to go deep with > that. > > however, if we're going to speak about GNU system we're limited with a few > components: > - GNU userland - ok it exists > - GNU toolchain - yep it works > - GNU kernel/system services - ... nope > I know linux kernel just works, but it's not a GNU project. Debian GNU/Hurd has been available for a long time. Around 75% of all Debian packages are available, see For more info see: http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/ https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/index.html is outdated. https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/ https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/Hurd
