GNU Hurd Reports Progress: AArch64 Support and Translators in Rust

The GNU Hurd project has published its development status report for the second quarter of 2026. The document summarizes recent work on the alternative GNU kernel, which remains part of the GNU project despite decades of development.

Porting to AArch64

According to the report, the team has made notable progress in porting Hurd to the AArch64 architecture. This effort is seen as an important step toward broadening the system's hardware support, which has traditionally been limited to the x86 architecture.

Translators in Rust

The report also devotes particular attention to experiments with writing translators — the key mechanism in Hurd that implements file systems and other services in user space — in the Rust programming language. Using Rust could potentially improve the security and reliability of such components.

The Project Lives On

The report's authors emphasize that development of Hurd continues, despite the skepticism that has accompanied the project for years. Regular quarterly reports remain the primary way of keeping the community informed about the progress of the work.

GNU Hurd is an experimental microkernel-based operating system kernel, developed as part of the GNU project since the late 1980s as an alternative to Linux. Despite the slow pace of development, the project still draws the attention of free software enthusiasts and operating system researchers.

Source: Phoronix