microkernel

2 Articles

They Weren’t Joking: Gentoo WAS Ported To GNU Hurd

April 13, 2026 by 5 Comments

Long ago, in the aftermath of the UNIX wars, three kernels emerged from the rubble: BSD, Linux, and Hurd. BSD, being UNIX, was held back by legal wrangling in the aftermath of the wars, and that allowed Linux to pull ahead to a pole position it still enjoys to this day. BSD has its following, of course, but Hurd? GNU Hurd seemed destined to languish… until April 1st, 2026, when the Gentoo Linux distribution was ported to the Free Software Foundation’s kernel.

It turns out, they weren’t actually joking. The joke part was that they were moving fully to the Hurd kernel, away from Linux– you can absolutely still run Gentoo with the Linux kernel, and make no mistake, that’s still the default and best-supported option. Options are good, though, and the Gentoo team has decided that it’s time to add some options to the kernel space, and give the Hurd some time in the sun.

Unlike the Linux kernel, which follows closely the monolithic UNIX framework– and the BSD-Unix kernel, which is Unix–GNU Hurd is a microkernel architecture, based originally on the Mach kernel. In that, it’s rather like MacOS. Unlike MacOS, given its roots in the Free Software Foundation, GNU Hurd is 100% free and open source. There are advantages to a microkernel architecture– it keeps drivers out of kernel space so a dodgy WiFi adapter can’t crash your system, for example– but the big disadvantage is, of course, drivers. Both Linux and BSD drivers can be ported, but that takes work and many of them have not been.

Still, now that Microsoft has become a major contributor to the Linux kernel, we could see a lot of the old-school Linux users who talk about “win-doze” and still spell Microsoft with a dollar sign being tempted to join the Hurd. If that appeals to you and you’re not into Gentoo, Debian has quietly let you install with the Hurd kernel for years now. It’s either that or embrace BSD and escape the chaos vortex.

The big three aren’t the only POSIX kernels out there, of course– there’s even one written entirely in Rust, for the die hard rustaceans amongst you.

Forget Troy. Try HelenOS

August 20, 2017 by 17 Comments

Even though it seems like there are a lot of operating system choices, the number narrows if you start counting kernels, instead of distributions. Sure, Windows is clearly an operating system family, and on the Unix-like side, there is Linux and BSD. But many other operating systems–Ubuntu, Fedora, Raspian–they all derive from some stock operating system. There are some outliers, though, and one of those is HelenOS. The open source OS runs on many platforms, including PCs, Raspberry PIs, Beaglebones, and many others.

Although the OS isn’t new, it is gaining more features and is now at version 0.7. You can see a video about some of the new features, below.

According to the project’s web site:

HelenOS is a portable microkernel-based multiserver operating system designed and implemented from scratch. It decomposes key operating system functionality such as file systems, networking, device drivers and graphical user interface into a collection of fine-grained user space components that interact with each other via message passing. A failure or crash of one component does not directly harm others. HelenOS is therefore flexible, modular, extensible, fault tolerant and easy to understand.

Continue reading “Forget Troy. Try HelenOS” →