GNU Hurd gets 9pfs, OpenNTPD, dynamic /dev/ entries, and more

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The hottest and most promising operating system kernel in development, the GNU Hurd, has published another summary of its most recent quarter of development.

New ports and developments

Hurd has experimental support for 9pfs now, a work-in-progress port of OpenNTPD (the NTP daemon from OpenBSD), a port of Neovim, and a few more ports here and there.

Dynamic /dev/ entries

Diving deeper into the actual kernel itself, there’s a major improvement to how the Hurd handles entries in /dev/. Mikhail Karpov added some checks for mmap in several places. He also worked on adding storeio to the bootstrap chain. This is actually quite interesting.

Currently the Hurd sets device entries in ↫ The Hurd’s quartely report/dev/ statically. For example, I am writing this qoth on a Hurd machine that is using two /dev/ entries for my filesystem: /dev/wd0s1 for swap and /dev/wd0s5 for my root filesystem. However, /dev/wd0s1 through /dev/wd0s16 exist on my computer! Once Mikhail’s project is done, then the Hurd will dynamically populate SATA devices at boot time! No more need for static translators!

Networking improvements

The dhcpcd port we talked about earlier this year keeps improving too, which is quite important for future IPv6 support.

Of course, there’s way more to dive into, and reading about a bunch of people developing their own thing without any regard for or interest in the mainstream always feels a little bit like a cold glass of tonic - the best soft drink - in the depths of hell. Keep at it.

I have to admit, I was surprised to learn that the Hurd didn’t already have 9pfs support. I guess I kind of assumed it would have knocked that one out years ago. Now I want to dig out my T420 and give it a whirl.