Hurd

The Hurd will be the foundation of the whole GNU system. It

is built on top of the Mach 3.0 kernel, a free

message-passing kernel developed by CMU. Mach's virtualmemory management and message-passing facilities are

extensively used by the Hurd. The GNU C Library will provide

the Unix system call interface, and will call the Hurd for

needed services it can't provide itself.

One goal of the Hurd is to establish a framework for shared

development and maintenance. The Hurd is like GNU Emacs in

that it will allow a broad range of users to create and share

useful projects without knowing much about the internal

workings of the system -- projects that might never have been

attempted without freely available source, a well-designed

interface, and a multi-server-based design.

Currently there are free ports of the Mach kernel to the

Intel 80386 IBM PC, the DEC PMAX workstation, the

Luna 88k and several other machines, with more in

progress, including the Amiga and DEC Alpha-3000

machines. Contact [email protected], if you want to help with

one of these or start your own. Porting the GNU Hurd and GNU

C Library is easy (easier than porting GNU Emacs, certainly

easier than porting GCC) once a Mach port to a particular

platform exists.

[June 1994 GNU's Bulletin].

(1994-12-07)