GNU Hurd Q2 2026: AArch64 port revived, dynamic disk detection, Rust translators

The Hurd’s spring quarter was dominated by infrastructure work that chips away at the microkernel OS’s long-standing rough edges. Paulo Duarte revived Sergey Bugaev’s dormant AArch64 kernel port, resubmitting the gnumach kernel-side implementation as an RFC series that deliberately drops roughly 150 files of cross-architecture refactoring in favor of smaller per-arch shims, keeping the i386 tree bit-identical to master. It passes 12/12 tests on x86_64, i686, and aarch64 under QEMU, though bare-metal validation on Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi hardware is still pending. Bugaev separately open-sourced an incomplete 9P filesystem translator on GitHub and handed it to the community, with basic browsing, path resolution, reads, and rudimentary write support already working.

The most consequential thread is Mikhail Karpov’s work to make device nodes dynamic. Today the Hurd statically populates /dev entries whether or not the underlying partitions exist; Karpov’s expanded partfs translator can enumerate multiple disks and their partitions on demand, letting SATA devices be populated at boot rather than guessed at. Project lead Samuel Thibault is soliciting feedback on how to name these new entries and how to wire partfs into storeio and libstore so data flows directly from the underlying store instead of being copied through partfs. Elsewhere, Milos Nikic landed an ext3/ext4 binary-compatible journal (committed by Samuel with fixes to use CLOCK_MONOTONIC and remove a bogus double-unlock) plus a filesystem journal deadlock fix, and ported Neovim.

Porting and portability work rounded out the quarter: Mike Kelly brought OpenBSD’s OpenNTPD to the Hurd — which previously had no NTP daemon — surfacing a glibc SIGSTOP/SIGCONT bug that was duplicating file contents, and a rump memory error he traced back to shared NetBSD code. Almudena Garcia demonstrated that Hurd translators can now be written in Rust via a work-in-progress trivfs implementation, Joan Lledó continued the dhcpcd port with help from upstream maintainer Roy Maples, and Diego Nieto Cid landed nice-value and adjtime fixes across glibc and GNU Mach. It’s incremental, volunteer-driven progress, but the recurring theme — cross-project bug fixes and reused code benefiting both sides — shows the Hurd increasingly leaning on the broader BSD and GNU ecosystems.