The developers of the GNU Guix package manager and its derivative GNU/Linux distribution Guix System have announced the release of a 64-bit version of the Guix/Hurd distribution, which uses the GNU Hurd kernel instead of the Linux kernel. The option to install Guix/Hurd on x86_64 architecture systems has been added to the installer, but the capabilities of this distribution variant are significantly limited; for example, support for running the X server has not yet been implemented. In the 32-bit version of Guix/Hurd, approximately 1.7% of all packages from the Guix repository are supported, while in the 64-bit version, this figure is 0.9%. In comparison, Debian GNU/Hurd provides building support for 75% of Debian packages. 
Until recently, the GNU Hurd kernel only supported 32-bit mode and has only recently been ported and stabilized for x86_64 architecture. Work is ongoing to implement SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) support. In preparing Guix/Hurd, support for user-space drivers has been ensured, utilizing the mechanism developed by the NetBSD project known as rump (Runnable Userspace Meta Program). User-space stacks for USB and TCP/IP have been added, as well as drivers for SATA/USB disks and network adapters.
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.
Source: opennet.ru
