2018-q4

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 23:22:00 +0100

Hello! Welcome to a new qoth. This qoth covers new and interesting GNU/Hurd developments in Q4 of 2018! Details.

Joan Lledó completed a PCI Arbiter for the GNU/Hurd, and Damien Zammit helped polish it. This is a significant development and accomplishment! PCI stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect, and it is a standard that allows many computer peripherals to communicate together with the rest of the system smoothly. Of course, the GNU/Hurd intends to take this further by allowing ordinary users to safely access PCI cards! You can learn more about it in Samuel fosdem talk. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-10/msg00029.html

Joan Lledo` updated the GNU/Hurd lwip translator to work with the latest lwip. As a reminder lwip is a lightweight TCP/IP networking stack. The GNU/Hurd lwip translator provides a complete replacement to GNU/Hurd's pfinit. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00062.html

Damien Zammit created an ACPI translator. This translator provides a translator for mounting x86 ACPI tables under a path as read-only files. It is needed so that other things that depend on ACPI to find the base address such as Intel's IOMMU (DMAR table), memory mapped PCI space (MCFG table) etc, can be discovered in userspace. Otherwise, this functionality would need to be built into gnumach which would be a burden to maintain. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00049.html

Damien Zammit worked on allowing libstore to open non-mach devices, which is in preparation for rump kernel disk access. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-12/msg00050.html

Samuel Thibault allowed non-privileged users to mount their own tmpfs. It turned out to be a permission issue and a trivial fix. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00012.html

Samuel fixed a bfs issue with /proc not properly mounting. https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2018/10/msg00007.html

Samuel Thibault enabled LLVM to support the Hurd. This can hopefully pave the way to use LLVM sanitizers on the existing GNU/Hurd codebase. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Hurd-LLVM-Clang

Work toward porting Rust and Go to the GNU/Hurd is ongoing: https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2018/11/msg00020.html

Svante Signell worked on adding POSIX file record locking support. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2018-11/msg00058.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2016-12/msg00047.html

So if you want to test if your favorite packages work on the Hurd and contribute towards making the full GNU system usable for a wider range of people, please get in contact -- and maybe already grab the source code.