# GNU/Hurd development updates for Q4 2025

DevFeed: [GNU/Hurd development updates for Q4 2025](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/2025-q4-32747.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/news/2025-q4.html>)

Published: 2026-01-02T06:07:00Z

Content type: news

Language: en

Sources: [GNU Hurd](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/gnu-hurd.md>)

Topics: [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [lwIP](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/lwip.md>), [Network](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/network.md>), [Ethernet](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ethernet.md>)

Tags: [2025](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/2025.md>), [ethernet](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ethernet.md>), [ipv4](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ipv4.md>), [lwip](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/lwip.md>), [network](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/network.md>), [porting](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/porting.md>)

## AI overview

The Q4 2025 GNU/Hurd update reports progress on porting dhcpcd, including IPv4 and Ethernet support over lwIP, while noting limitations such as the lack of IPv6 and unfinished interface-change notifications. It also covers GNU Mach timeout improvements, interrupt and rumpnet fixes, and progress on SMP support.

## Source excerpt

Hello! Welcome to a new qoth. This qoth covers new and interesting GNU/Hurd developments in Q4 of 2025! Details. Joan Lledó worked on porting dhcpcd to the hurd. He also made some changes so that lwip would work with dhcpcd. In this message he writes: This is the current state of the port: Support only for IPv4. IPv6 not supported yet. It works only over lwip. First, because dhcpcd requires some definitions from headers and pfinet doesn't provide them AFAIK, but lwip provide the headers through the liblwip-dev package. Second, because both pfinet and lwip need changes in the translator in order to be fully compatible with dhcpcd, and I made the changes in lwip since I know it better. Only Ethernet is supported. This is because the Hurd doesn't define AF_LINK so dhcpcd can't get any data from the interface other thant what is returned by getifaddrs(). I'm manually providing the MAC address and hardcoding the interface type to Ethernet in the if_init function. I assume this is correct because the Hurd only supports ethernet interfaces AFAIK. dhcpcd monitors the interfaces and gets notified when there are changes in routes or network configurations. This is not working yet for the Hurd. dhcpcd implements some privilege separation by which the process spawns new processes that run as a non-privileged user. Or that's what I understood. It's not implemented for the Hurd because I've deferred this for now. Access to BPF is provided by libpcap. libpcap and liblwip-dev are dependencies for the Hurd. This has been tested only in a 32-bit Hurd. Damien Zammit worked on fixing some interrupt bugs in the acpi server. He also made some fixes for rumpnet. He also worked on adding a callwheel to GNU Mach's clock. This would make GNU Mach faster in certain ways. He writes: Timeouts are now very fast to look up, at the expense of more memory, a much shorter list is traversed rather than all of them. See [1]. Timeouts that are stopped before expiry are now faster to remove, and inserti