Most people don't realize it, but the Hurd system is actually well established. About 75% of Debian official packages do build fine, it has mainstream gcc/glibc/llvm support, go and rust ports are ongoing, it can be installed with the Debian installer and GuixSD and Arch ports are ongoing...

Yet not so much has been happening within the Hurd itself in the past couple of years. We have notably added a PCI arbiter, which allows for both flexible and safe PCI access for end users, and some basic ACPI support is ongoing. But many exciting features could be achieved with a bit of work.

This talk will discuss some of these promising features, to give a sort of ideas roadmap for contributions. Some have implementation sketches which just need to be polished to be more production-ready, such as httpfs, mboxfs, or writing translators in more high-level languages than C. Other features are at early stage, such as adding sound support through rump, getting complete rid of disk drivers from the kernel by moving them to userland, or also getting valgrind support. I will also discuss some promising ideas, such as using rump to get support for more filesystems.