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Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

What is the deal with GNU Hurd? I know it's become a bit of a punchline for software being late, but does anyone use it for anything?

This site says you can get a build of Debian based on Hurd instead of Linux -- does anyone use this? Is it purely an academic curiosity at this point?

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It's more like a cultural curiosity. It's an attempt to get a full GNU system on top of a microkernel. Except they've never gotten a particularly complete system working with any acceptable level of performance on any of many microkernels attempted.

It was already a punchline when I started trying to play with it in college circa 2004 or so.

RMS has said it's no longer a priority for the GNU Project to complete Hurd, as Linux works as a free kernel. But some people continue to work on Hurd out of technical interest.

Multiple attempts at replacing the Mach microkernel have fizzled out, meaning it's not even academically interesting. If Coyotos or Viengoos or L4.Sec had ever worked out, there would be something genuinely useful that people might want to work on.

I wasn't aware there were attempts to replace Mach with something else inside Hurd. I am really interested if you can share a bit of history about this; Especially if it's related to L4 and capability-computing. Same as Symmetry below, I would be interested in any L4 and seL4 based general purpose operating system project.

Very brief history is here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/port_to_another_mi...

Genode works on a variety of L4-based kernels, probably what you want to look at.

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