One of Hurd's goals is to isolate hardware drivers, to provide flexibility and safety, by isolating drivers' possibly erratic behavior, delegating driving hardware to unprivileged users, etc.
We are thus currently working on a PCI arbiter, which allows to let different userland drivers access PCI devices concurrently, while paving the way for fine-grain per-user, per-session, etc. permission management over PCI access, the use of IOMMUs allowing to do that very safely.
Speakers: Samuel Thibault