These wiki pages

Please read about how to contribute to this wiki.

The system itself

There are essential two kinds of Hurd system designs.

Hurd on Mach

For one there's the implementation of the Hurd running on the GNU Mach microkernel. This is what is commonly meant when people are talking about GNU/Hurd systems.

This system has mostly been designed and implemented in the '90s. It works and is usable. For example, this wiki system is running on a GNU/Hurd system.

You can try it out for yourself: for getting access, installing Debian GNU/Hurd will probably be the easiest and most feature-complete solution. If you don't have spare hardware to use for doing so, you can also get a shell account on a public Hurd machine. Depending on the things you're going to work on (and on your internet connection), this may be an easy way of getting used to Hurd systems. Installing in a virtual machine is another possibility, see the page about running a Hurd system for the full story.

Then you can either play around and eventually strive to do something useful or -- if you want -- ask us to assign something to you, depending on the skills you have and the resources you intend to invest.

Please spend some time with thinking about the items in this questionnaire.

For more reading resources, please see this whole wiki, and also http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/devel.html, http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/docs.html for links to a bunch of documents, and http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ in general.

Hurd on a modern microkernel

Developers have identified a number of problem with the Hurd on Mach system. Problems, that can not easily be fixed by bug-fixing the existing code base, but which require design changes -- deep going ones actually.

As such systems (as the desired one) are not in common use, but are -- if at all -- research projects, this new Hurd on a modern microkernel project itself is more a research project than a sit down and implement/code/hack project.

If you're interested in contributing in this area, knowing the Hurd on Mach system nevertheless is a prerequisite. At least have a deep look at the documentation pointers given in the previous section. Also read through the HurdNG section of this wiki.

Please send email to the l4-hurd mailing list for discussing this post-Mach system design.