[HN Gopher] Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 released
___________________________________________________________________
Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 released
Author : jrepinc
Score : 158 points
Date : 2025-08-09 23:02 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lists.debian.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lists.debian.org)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Dead link, at least for me.
|
| ... also, they're still working on Hurd?
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20250810064049/https://lists.gnu....
| numpad0 wrote:
| lists.gnu.org. 1800 IN A 209.51.188.17
| 17.0-24.188.51.209.in-addr.arpa. 1800 IN PTR lists.gnu.org.
| 64 bytes from 209.51.188.17: icmp_seq=1 ttl=42 time=219 ms
| curl: (7) Failed to connect to 209.51.188.17 port 443 after 208
| ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (7) Failed to
| connect to 209.51.188.17 port 80 after 212 ms: Couldn't connect
| to server ssh hey__your_http_is_down@209.51.188.17
| The authenticity of host '209.51.188.17 (209.51.188.17)' can't
| be established. ED25519 key fingerprint is
| SHA256:fKT2Sr7vshZxNytNKcnQgXhqtDYptpayjVTa1upy46w.
| JdeBP wrote:
| You can read the announcement on the WWW archive of the debian-
| hurd mailing list, instead.
|
| * https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2025/08/msg00038.html
| alhazrod wrote:
| I tried to get a copy of GNU Hurd via git a few weeks ago and it
| didn't work. Can someone post a working repository link?
| octrc wrote:
| https://git.sceen.net/hurd/hurd.git
|
| ref.
| https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/source_repositories.html#i...
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| To think Linus wrote linux to be a "good enough" solution until
| hurd was ready.
|
| The entire hurd system is a literal metaphor for how waiting till
| you're perfect means you'll never be good enough.
|
| At the risk of getting downvoted, I think hurd is cooked at this
| point. It certainly has some solid ideas that could live on in a
| modern system. They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig)
| and at least have the opportunity to catch mindshare with new
| engineers just dabbling in systems engineering.
| raverbashing wrote:
| GNU mentality in a nutshell
|
| Also I can't remember any more recent GNU projects that were
| successful
| tombert wrote:
| I guess it sort of depends on how you define "success";
| there's plenty of projects that still have some development
| and active users.
|
| TeXMacs was release in the late 90's (I think) and it's
| pretty neat and I think has at least some user base, and I
| think GNU Parallel was released in the mid 2000s and I know a
| number of people who use that (including myself).
| spookie wrote:
| Jami, or Taler come to mind. The latter just released, so...
| Yeah.
|
| https://www.taler.net/en/news/2025-01.html
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Guix as well. It's very good.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig)
|
| It's an antipattern to chase whatever language is being hyped
| the most at the moment. And it's probably bad from a community
| POV to deliberately attract developers who are chasing hype.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah, projects like this really need people who will be into
| it for the long term, and using something like rust or zig is
| a big gamble. It eliminates a huge swath of potential long-
| term contributors who know C well and don't want to change,
| in exchange for an unknown group with an unknown amount of
| overlap.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > It eliminates a huge swath of potential long-term
| contributors who know C well and don't want to change,
|
| that pretty much described the current hurd dev community
| and its dying. I wouldn't advocate a full RIIR for most
| things but I think its a solid hail Mary to maybe make hurd
| relevant. The alternative is its going to be dead in a few
| years when the contributors all age out to spend time with
| their grandkids.
| pengaru wrote:
| > It eliminates a huge swath of potential long-term
| contributors who know C well and don't want to change
|
| I don't think that swath is as huge as you think it is in
| 2025.
|
| We were saying the same stuff during the Golang heydays
| ~8-9 years ago, and the C experts were already pretty
| fucking MIA.
|
| The Linux and systemd projects are both suffering from a
| lack of new blood interested in writing plain old C, and
| the old guard is aging out. Linux is embracing Rust, which
| should help. I imagine systemd will do the same thing once
| a Rust toolchain is required to build the average distro
| kernel.
| freedomben wrote:
| I had a friend who got involved with Hurd many years back, and
| I asked him why he thought Hurd wasn't going to be a thing for
| non-hobbyists. He shared this (re-shared with permission but
| anonymously as he's still somewhat involved in GNU projects),
| which is just one guy's perspective of course. Would love to
| hear from others if this echoes their experiences.
|
| > GNU is full of brilliant people who can write great code, but
| there are a few issues that I don't see fixing: Rampant
| disagreement and individuals who like to work solo. This can be
| good sometimes, but for a project with that scope it just isn't
| possible. The group is also aging and isn't getting new blood.
| This can be good because people have more free time, but it
| also traps us in old familiar/comfortable patterns that make
| onboarding younger contributors even more difficult than it
| already is. The philosophy is also quite rigid. For good
| reasons I think as more "permissive" licenses have been used to
| abuse users extensively, but the limitations do come up quite a
| bit, mainly with adoption. I think too many people are just
| scarred still from an earlier world where proprietary was often
| the only real alternative, and change is hard.
| jnpnj wrote:
| gnu less-is-more
| tombert wrote:
| I still haven't used Hurd, and at this point with the ridiculous
| diversity in hardware for desktop and laptops I don't think I
| could realistically use it for anything outside of playing with
| it in a virtual machine or something.
|
| Still, a part of me wishes we lived in the alternative universe
| where Hurd had taken over the world instead of Linux. I don't
| know much about kernel design so I'm speaking out of my ass here,
| but I've always thought that the microkernel design was more
| elegant than the monolithic thing we ended up with. I don't know
| that the alternate universe would be "better", and maybe
| realistically a design like Hurd would never be able to take over
| the world like Linux, but it always seemed cooler to me.
|
| I honestly didn't really realize that they were still working on
| Hurd. Does anyone here use it for anything?
| asveikau wrote:
| I seem to recall the Hurd people talking about cool scenarios
| like filesystem drivers written entirely in user mode that
| don't require root. Something like that.
|
| I booted it on real hardware sometime in the early 2000s, and
| it worked but was very anticlimactic.
|
| I do know that the Mach microkernel they based it on (also the
| basis for Apple's XNU kernel) is considered dated. Later
| microkernels are supposed to have better performance.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I've always thought was interesting about
| microkernels; the ability to have a lot more stuff in user
| space always seemed like the obvious "correct" direction to
| me.
|
| I played with RedoxOS a bit in a virtual machine a few years
| ago [1], and it seemed cool, so maybe that can be the logical
| successor to something like Hurd.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedoxOS
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Oh, I thought that was going to die shortly after Jeremy
| moved to System76, but it didn't,
|
| - https://www.redox-os.org/news/
| eadmund wrote:
| > I played with RedoxOS a bit in a virtual machine a few
| years ago, and it seemed cool, so maybe that can be the
| logical successor to something like Hurd.
|
| A problem with RedoxOS is that it is not GPLed:
| contributors have no assurance that they and others will be
| able to use software built with their contributions.
|
| Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook all have plenty of
| money to pay engineers; they don't need my contributions
| for free.
| bawolff wrote:
| And now we have FUSE. The good ideas do get taken up by the
| mainstream.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We have entire userspace network protocols, ePBF, and to
| some extent even ePool pooling ideas from microkernels. But
| A single disgruntled kernel dev is enough to stop Rust
| device drivers from existing, so no, the idea is still not
| here.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| That didn't happen.
| josefx wrote:
| Even the Asahi Linux lead threatening Linus with a
| witchhunt against all kernel maintainers did not manage
| to finish off the ongoing Rust integration. People may
| not like it but it isn't going down easily.
| asveikau wrote:
| I feel like there's a difference between FUSE, an
| _anomalous_ way to implement a filesystem, and having the
| user-space method be the _primary_ mechanism to implement a
| filesystem. The latter ensures that the user-space thing
| doesn 't have a quality gap with "real" FS drivers.
| bawolff wrote:
| > but I've always thought that the microkernel design was more
| elegant than the monolithic thing we ended up with.
|
| The thing with elegant systems is they usually don't succeed if
| the alternative is something pragmatic that has been battle
| tested.
| tombert wrote:
| No question, and especially now with Linux running on
| billions of devices (if you include Android in that at
| least), it would be kind of difficult to make a case for a
| brand new desktop operating system. A _lot_ of the weird edge
| cases for Linux have been found and fixed and ironed out
| through decades of continued use.
|
| I tried installing FreeBSD on a laptop years ago, which isn't
| really an "obscure" operating system or anything, but even
| that had a lot of compatibility problems with regards to
| drivers for wifi and GPUs, and even that would have a
| considerable head-start over something like Hurd if it were
| to try and take on the desktop world.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Speaking of BSD, in the hypothetical no-Linux universe,
| that would be the obvious candidate for taking the Linux
| spot, right? Rather than Hurd. BSD might even have won in
| the Linux-included universe, if some random events has
| panned out differently. Why not, right?
| tombert wrote:
| Didn't Linus even say that if he had known about BSD he
| wouldn't have bothered with Linux? I could totally see an
| alternate universe where BSD took over the world.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's arguable that the main reason Linux took off where
| BSD didn't was the fights and copyright arguments around
| BSD at the time.
|
| Had they not existed, or BSD been obviously free and
| clear, Linux might have been a footnote.
| butterisgood wrote:
| I recall either Linus or a major Linux contributor (Alan
| Cox?) saying that if he had had a math coprocessor, he
| would have likely just ran BSD.
|
| I don't think even 386BSD existed when Linus started
| Linux.
| jraph wrote:
| It could have been that more effort would have been put
| in Hurd if Linux hadn't taken off.
|
| And then BSD could have won against Hurd anyway.
| Especially when corps like the permissive license and are
| afraid of the FSF.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| Yes and no. The gaming industry serves as an illustrative
| example because we know the Sony Playstation 4 and 5 are
| both based on FreeBSD[0].
|
| Compare Sony PlayStation Network[1]
| Monthly active users on PlayStation Network reached 123
| million as of June 30, 2025.
|
| with Valve's Steam[2] Valve reported 132
| million active monthly players (that is, they used Steam
| within the month, as opposed to being logged in at exact
| the same time) at the end of 2021... This
| isn't scientific, but if the same ratio of active monthly
| to peak concurrent users held through to today, back of
| the napkin math would put Steam's current active monthly
| users at 221.5 million
|
| With an optimistic estimate of current Monthly Active
| Users, if gaming on Linux grew overnight from 2.5% to 50%
| of total players on Steam, then it would still be
| slightly behind half of the people who are currently
| gaming on FreeBSD-based Playstation.
|
| Evidently BSD is a go-to choice for consumers today, but
| many don't realize it, and those of us who do often do
| not think about it. That's because the BSD license
| results in products that bear no resemblance to the BSD
| we know.
|
| A similar situation occurred with Minix - to the extent
| that it's creator Andrew Tannenbaum had no idea it's
| install base was arguably bigger than Linux. Intel had
| put Minix into the Management Engine on their
| professional grade CPUs for years. The BSD license
| allowed Intel to put it everywhere without the knowledge
| of the wider Minix community.
|
| In some key ways, BSD is already taking the Linux spot,
| however, I'd argue that BSD can't truly take the Linux
| spot because the GPL license makes the Linux spot what it
| is. I honestly can't say if this makes Linux better or
| worse off. The most advanced technology of our time is
| largely not choosing copyleft licenses, and for those who
| did choose it, they've taken steps to distance themselves
| from it[3][4][5][6].
|
| Given all this, I think Hurd has more of a chance to be
| the spiritual successor to Linux (if it disappeared). The
| only caveat is there is zero chance for a big-tech-
| dominated $200M "Hurd Foundation" to arise due to
| Hurd's's affiliation with the Free Software Foundation.
| Not much of the Linux Foundation's money actually goes to
| Linux, so it may not matter in the grand scheme of
| things[7].
|
| [0] https://wololo.net/2023/03/22/new-freebsd-
| vulnerabilities-co...
|
| [1] https://www.psu.com/news/psn-hits-123-million-
| monthly-active...
|
| [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/steam-just-
| cracked-4...
|
| [3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-
| fuchsia-smar...
|
| [4] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-
| development-...
|
| [5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos
| _move/
|
| [6] https://lwn.net/Articles/655519/
|
| [7] https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/The-annual-report-of-
| the-Linu...
| m463 wrote:
| You're talking about systemd right? :)
|
| I suspect that there is a place for elegant systems - they
| just have to be pragmatic in how they launch.
|
| Start small, do a limited function, or replace an existing
| limited function, and grow from there.
|
| Thing is, linux is a kernel, but its driver support and hooks
| into the rest of userspace makes it more than just a kernel.
| Harder to replace with something more elegant/better.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > The thing with elegant systems is they usually don't
| succeed if the alternative is something faster.
|
| FTFY
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Didn't Blackberry's OS have a microkernel?
| lormayna wrote:
| Yes, it was based on QNX
| bombcar wrote:
| The "gnu" in the famous email is GNU Hurd; we're still waiting:
|
| >I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be
| big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| no it's not, the GNU system was already established by
| then,.and in use with other kernels. Linus was referring to
| GNU as a whole, not Hurd.
| bombcar wrote:
| GNU was a toolchain in search of a kernel; which was
| supposed to be Hurd.
|
| (It often got installed on top of "real" Unix because it
| was a _damn good toolchain_ )
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Curiously, in what no academic could have predicted, millions
| of people interact with a microkernel every day, and it was
| written by freaking _Nintendo_ of all possible companies. (The
| Switch is a custom microkernel called Horizon; not FreeBSD, not
| Linux, not Android.) Almost every other consumer device is
| monolithic or hybrid.
|
| While the Switch was broken early, this was due to NVIDIA's
| buggy boot code. The operating system itself... you could
| literally pwn WebKit or the Bluetooth driver, and get
| absolutely nowhere. SciresM famously reimplemented the kernel
| in an open source fashion (Mesosphere) and the secure monitor
| code (Exosphere), and has publicly stated they have _zero_
| possible security bugs in his eyes. That was in 2020 and there
| have not been any reports of kernel security bugs since.
| comex wrote:
| To be fair, microkernels are also highly successful in
| embedded devices and auxiliary processors. It's just that you
| don't usually directly interact with them. For example, Intel
| ME runs MINIX, and Apple's Secure Enclave Processor runs L4.
| Also most OSes these days have some kind of hypervisor/secure
| monitor that's more privileged than the regular kernel: TEE
| on Android, SPTM on Apple, VBS on Windows, and proprietary
| ones on all the game consoles. They vary in how much
| functionality they're actually responsible for, but if it's a
| significant amount then they tend to have a microkernel-ish
| design internally.
|
| Another example of microkernel-based systems you do interact
| with is car infotainment systems, where QNX has apparently
| seen a lot of use - though I think these days it's being
| displaced by Linux and Android Automotive? I don't actually
| know much about that industry.
| riffic wrote:
| I think of Plan 9 practically every day but I'm only reminded
| approximately once every few years to the existence of Hurd.
| tombert wrote:
| Genuine question, as someone who has only ever played with
| Inferno and Plan 9 in virtual machines and only for brief
| periods of time in the process: what does Plan 9 actually buy
| you?
|
| Like, I've read about how you can mount lots of things like
| filesystems and that sounds kind of neat but that also seemed
| like it might obscure latency and make things ridiculously
| slow, though it's entirely likely that I am misunderstanding
| how things work.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Forcing everything into the single abstraction of the
| filesystem lets do useful things with less trouble than other
| systems. As an example: Plan 9 doesn't have any use for
| containers because in its world chroot is exhaustive. You
| don't need special namespaces to control ex. network access,
| because network access goes through a filesystem in your
| chroot.
| project2501a wrote:
| So, what you are saying is we need a cat with a phat wallet
| to fund development on the thing and make it sleek.
|
| It would really be a real competitor with linux in the
| server market.
| tombert wrote:
| Maybe, though what I was trying to get at with my comment
| still isn't really addressed. It seems like if you're
| making everything a filesystem and making it so that the
| OS doesn't care about _where_ the filesystem is, it can
| be very easy for latency costs to pile up.
|
| I really should properly play with it, but it always
| seemed to me that it has the potential to add
| milliseconds of cost to each operation and that could be
| very slow.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Just because you can run it over the network doesn't mean
| you have to. Like, yeah, you _can_ run Linux with root on
| NFS and yes it can make you vulnerable to latency
| problems, but you can also run Plan 9 completely on a
| single machine with all the myriad filesystems coming
| from from the local system (mostly virtual, but some
| actually hitting disk).
|
| If you mean that microkernels ping-ponging between kernel
| and user space can impact perf: Maybe? I'd really want to
| see benchmarks.
| butterisgood wrote:
| Plan 9's file system interface makes it a great way to build
| a network "mux". I added a reverse http(s) capable proxy
| using rc-httpd and webfs to effectively tunnel
| Shoutcast/Icecast streams from a Mac behind a firewall, with
| 9front being the only exposed endpoint.
|
| It took an afternoon to figure out how, and was basically
| "cat".
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| It would be cool to have a Hurd project with a verified
| microkernel like seL4.
|
| AI is getting good enough to help with the verification process
| and having a hardened kernel would guard a bit better than the
| current strategy of using containers everywhere.
| butterisgood wrote:
| I don't know why this got downvoted... Hurd was indeed
| investigating L4 as an alternative microkernel for some time.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/port_to_another_mi...
|
| Neal Walfield was working on a new microkernel as well:
| https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/viengoos.html
| a3w wrote:
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1508/
| jraph wrote:
| Off topic: this is from April 6, 2015; I'm impressed at the
| Elon Musk project guess. I would not discard someone's guess of
| some xOS appearing around 2028-2030 to quickly _today_.
| JdeBP wrote:
| There are "they"s coming up repeatedly in this discussion.
|
| I think that it's important to remember that Debian Hurd is not
| some massive project with thousands of anonymous people behind
| it. Like Tribblix and Peter Tribble, Debian Hurd's driving force
| is someone whom you can name: Samuel Thibault.
|
| And although there _are_ a few others that appear on the debian-
| hurd mailing list from time to time, it is amply clear that this
| is one of those (many) projects with a core group of very few
| dedicated people, with _very limited resources_ for development
| and testing. There is no many hands making light work, here.
|
| This isn't Debian as you may know it for other kernels. (-:
|
| * https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2025/07/maillist.html
|
| So, in some ways, if microkernels interest you, Debian Hurd is a
| place to contribute where the ground has yet to be completely
| trodden.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I have not followed Hurd since ~2010 when development stalled,
| what is the purpose of Hurd at this point? Is it just hobbyists
| having fun and exploring the possibilities or are they still
| trying to become a viable option or something else or a little of
| a bunch of things? I think I will try installing Debian GNU/Hurd
| on an old laptop, always wanted to play with Hurd but I never
| succeeded in getting any computer I had to boot up with it and
| never had interest in running OSes in VMs.
|
| Years ago I was met with derisive laughter from everyone when I
| said Haiku would hit 1.0 before Hurd. I also said that Haiku
| would beat linux to the opensource desktop widely used by the
| average person who is not concerned with opensource, but I think
| that was mostly stirring the pot because of the reaction to my
| previous statement. All these years later and Haiku hitting 1.0
| seems inevitable and even the idea of it becoming a widely
| adopted opensource OS does not seem that far fetched. I would
| like to see Hurd hit 1.0, but I am fairly skeptical at this
| point.
|
| I suppose ChromeOS/linux beat Haiku to the punch for the
| opensource desktop, but I think I will stick to my guns on this
| one and play semantics, many in the linux/oss view ChromeOS as
| linux/oss in name only. A cheat but I think Haiku has earned it.
|
| Edit: Forgot that Chomium was opensource but ChromeOS is not, so
| I guess I had no need to play semantics.
| SlowTao wrote:
| I love how Haiku feels like it has its feet in two places at
| once. That it is both in the year 2000 and 2040 at the same
| time.
|
| It does feel a lot more user ready than a lot of alternatives.
| Although I did find it funny that on their last release a big
| milestone is that it can now compile code a little faster than
| half the speed of Linux. So performance is still lacking but
| gaining. Considering their team size compared with Linux, that
| is a big achievement.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I think things like compilation speed are fairly low on their
| priority list because they are focusing on the user and not
| the developer, the people who are not going to bother
| compiling anything and want the OS to be something they never
| have to think about. Lack of focus on the user seems a big
| part of why I think linux has failed to gain a real foothold,
| or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the linux
| community pushed too hard long before it viable for that use
| case and now there are alot of people out there who tried
| linux a decade ago and remember spending a lot of time
| fiddling with their system and jumping through hoops instead
| of just using the computer for those things they use a
| computer for. Some distros are viable these days for the
| average person, but a lot of those average people have a bad
| taste left in their mouth from when they tried <my favorite
| distro is perfect for you!>.
| o11c wrote:
| Well, prior to this release I would have said "there is no
| point", but it looks like Hurd has _finally_ gotten rid of some
| of the major warts I remember when I first took at look at it
| over a decade ago.
|
| A lot of software fails to build on Hurd because it makes
| (often dangerously) false assumptions that the software really
| needs to think about properly. `PATH_MAX` is the most visible
| one, but others exist as well.
|
| (By contrast, I have found that software that fails on one of
| the BSDs is often failing because the particular OS completely
| lacks some essential feature, or at least lacks a stable
| API/ABI thereto.)
| ofalkaed wrote:
| So what would you say its point is now?
| kristopolous wrote:
| Is it still XNU/OSF-1 inspired? Are people running it on actual
| metal?
| butterisgood wrote:
| Interesting! I ran some version of Hurd back in 1998, with ip
| masquerading and forwarding through a dial-up capable Linux box.
|
| And now it's 64bit!?
| aussiegreenie wrote:
| Has anyone compared the HarmonyOS NEXT to Debian Hurd?
|
| HarmonyOS NEXT is the world's most widely used microkernel
| system, reportedly used on approximately 800 million systems.
| QuiCasseRien wrote:
| Is any new operating system is able to emerge nowadays ?
|
| each week there are (in C, in Rust, in JS...)
|
| What are their hardware support ?
|
| at best they can run in a virtual machine
|
| End of debate.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| First: Hurd isn't a new operating system. It's a decades old
| project from last millennium.
|
| And then: Doing research in operating systems serves a lot of
| purposes. For some it's just fun. For some it's experimenting
| which may lead to ideas which may be incorporated into other
| OSs later, where eit is a lot simpler to do in a small kernel.
| For some it is an attempt to take over the world, few of those
| will, but maybe one might. At least for a small part of the
| world.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Huh... the 64-bit release is news to me. I thought GNU Hurd was
| 32-bit only?
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