GNU Hurd news 2026-q2

In Q2 of 2026, numerous contributors made significant advancements in the GNU Hurd project. Joshua Branson introduced a visually appealing SVG logo for the Ethernet multiplexor, created using Inkscape on a Hurd laptop. The Hurd wiki could benefit from additional artwork, and the community is encouraged to share their favorite Hurd translators that may need artwork.

Sergey Bugaev shared a work-in-progress 9pfs (source code) and established a corresponding wiki page. Initially, he added write support to the project. Etienne Brateau enhanced the project by adding validation to the msync function, ensuring better adherence to POSIX standards.

Diego Nieto Cid focused on privileged user task management, allowing users to set their task priority (nice value). His patches were integrated into both glibc and GNU Mach. Additionally, he resolved a minor bug in the test suite, fixed an adjtime bug that benefits the OpenNTPD port, and addressed two other bugs.

Paulo Duarte submitted a series of RFC patches aimed at incorporating Sergey's previous AArch64 work. He also rectified a minor cross-compilation issue. gfleury contributed to correcting a few typos in the tmpfs code and addressed a kernel crash caused by a null pointer deference.

Almudena Garcia is developing a proof-of-concept WIP trivfs implementation in Rust, enabling Hurd translators to be written in this language. Mikhail Karpov added checks for mmap in various locations and initiated work on incorporating storeio into the bootstrap chain, allowing the Hurd to dynamically populate SATA devices at boot time instead of relying on static translators. Samuel, the project's leader, is seeking feedback on how to name these new /dev entries.

Mike Kelly has been diligently working on porting OpenBSD's OpenNTPD, which necessitated some glibc modifications. Although the Hurd currently lacks a NTP daemon, Mike's efforts are crucial in this regard. He also resolved a memory error within rump and provided a brown-tape solution, benefiting both projects that share the same codebase.

Joan Lledó persisted in his efforts to port dhcpcd, while Roy Maples, the dhcpcd maintainer, provided valuable assistance. Bradley Morgan rectified a minor implementation bug within the cat program, tweaked procfs to display hidden files, and enabled the passing of "-s" to init, previously a feature that was ignored.

Johannes Schauer and Marin Rodrigues collaborated on getting s-build to function on amd64 Hurd systems, resulting in a lengthy email exchange. Milos Nikic successfully ported Neovim, contributed bug fixes to libdiskfs, and resolved a deadlock bug in the ext3/ext4 filesystem journal. Samuel Thibault confirmed that the Hurd can support nvmes with rump, but the work is still ongoing.

Leonardo Lopes Pereira engaged in spring cleaning to eliminate dead code within the project. Samuel Thibault mentioned the potential for supporting nvmes with rump but noted that the work is not yet complete. The anonymous user yelini worked on porting the D language compiler. Damien Zammit focused on enhancing the Hurd's WIP CI on GNU/Linux running on an AArch64 computer and integrated qemu's Hurd support into upstream qemu's CI to prevent it from bitrotting.

Sophiel Zhou addressed a minor pfinet permission checking issue and ensured that pfinet would not fail under memory pressure.