The release of the Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 distribution has been announced, combining the Debian software environment with the GNU/Hurd kernel. The Debian GNU/Hurd repository includes approximately 72% of the packages from the total size of the Debian archive, including ported versions of Firefox and Xfce. Installation images (364MB) are only created for the i386 architecture. Pre-built images for familiarization with the distribution without installation are prepared for of virtual machines.
Debian GNU/Hurd remains the only actively developed Debian platform built on a kernel other than Linux (the Debian GNU/KFreeBSD port was previously developed but has long been abandoned). The GNU/Hurd platform is not part of the officially supported architectures of Debian, so releases of Debian GNU/Hurd are formed separately and have the status of an unofficial release of Debian.
GNU Hurd is a kernel developed as a replacement for the Unix kernel and structured as a set of servers, running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel and implementing various system services such as file systems, network stack, file access management system. The GNU Mach microkernel provides an IPC mechanism used to organize interaction between the components of GNU Hurd and build a distributed multi-server architecture.
In the new release:
- The package base of the Debian 13 distribution is utilized.
- Full support for 64-bit systems has been implemented. The level of package support in the 64-bit build has been raised to that of i386.
- In the 64-bit environment, disk drivers from NetBSD are used, operating in user space and based on the mechanism proposed by the NetBSD project known as rump (Runnable Userspace Meta Program).
- Support for USB drives and CD-ROMs is provided through Rump.
- By default, extended file attributes (xattr) are enabled for bootstrapping from other operating systems using mmdebstrap.
- Rust has been ported for GNU/Hurd.
- Packages have been prepared for SMP support.
- The xkb tool is used in the console for switching keyboard layouts.
- Support for ACPI, RTC, APIC, and HPET has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
