GNU Hurd - Development History

Development History

Richard Stallman founded the GNU project in September 1983 with an aim to create a free GNU operating system. Initially the components required for kernel and development were written: editors, shell, compiler and all the others. By 1989, GPL came into being and the only major component missing was the kernel.

Development on the Hurd began in 1990 after an abandoned kernel attempt in 1986, based on the research TRIX operating system developed by Professor Steve Ward and his group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). According to Thomas Bushnell, the initial Hurd architect, their early plan was to adapt the 4.4BSD-Lite kernel and, in hindsight, "It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today". In 1987 Richard Stallman proposed to use the Mach microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Work on this was delayed for three years due to uncertainty over whether CMU would release the Mach code under a suitable license.

With the release of the Linux kernel in 1991, the primary user of GNU's userland components soon became operating systems based on the Linux kernel (Linux distributions), prompting the coining of the controversial term GNU/Linux.

Development of the Hurd has proceeded slowly. Despite an optimistic announcement by Stallman in 2002 predicting a release of GNU/Hurd later that year, the Hurd is still not considered suitable for production environments. Development in general has not met expectations, and there are still bugs and missing features. This has resulted in a poorer product than many (including Stallman) had expected. In 2010, after twenty years under development, Stallman said that he was "not very optimistic about the GNU Hurd. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems", but added that "finishing it is not crucial" for the GNU system because a free kernel already existed in Linux, and completing Hurd would not address the main remaining problem for a free operating system: device support.

The Debian project, among others, have worked on the Hurd project to produce binary distributions of Hurd-based GNU operating systems for IBM PC compatible systems.