GNU Hurd 0.9 & Mach 1.8 Released: Adds Ethernet Multiplexer, Mach Drops ACPI

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 18 December 2016 at 06:00 PM EST. 14 Comments
GNU
There is an early GNU Christmas with the release of GNU Hurd 0.9 joined by GNU Mach 1.8. Yep, another rare released update to Hurd.

GNU Hurd 0.9 supports its boot program running as an unprivileged user, an Ethernet multiplexer has been merged to support better virtual interfaces, the addition of the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) library, and many bug fixes.

GNU Mach meanwhile as the microkernel upon which GNU Hurd systems are based, has seen many changes with version 1.8. Mach 1.8 has significantly reworked its memory management system, the virtual memory system now uses a red-black tree for allocations, and improved debugging / error reporting. There are also many bug fixes in Mach and GNU Mach has dropped its partial ACPI support.

ACPI being dropped was explained as, "Adding the ACPI parser from GRUB was a mistake as its license conflicts with the one used by the legacy Linux drivers. Furthermore, adding support for ACPI to the kernel violates the minimality principle."

More details on GNU Hurd 0.9 and GNU Mach 1.8 can be found via the release details posted to the Hurd project site.
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