The release of the Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 distribution, combining the Debian software environment with the GNU/Hurd kernel, has been announced. The Debian GNU/Hurd repository includes about 65% of the packages from the total size of the Debian archive, including ported versions of Firefox and Xfce. Installation builds (364MB) are available only for the i386 architecture. Ready-made images (4.9GB) are provided for exploring the distribution without installation. 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 12 distribution has been utilized.
- A disk driver has been prepared, which operates in user space and is based on the mechanism proposed by the NetBSD project known as rump (Runnable Userspace Meta Program). This driver allows the system to boot without the need for Linux drivers and a layer that runs Linux drivers through a special emulation layer in the Mach kernel. In such a boot, the Mach kernel manages the CPU, memory, timer, and interrupt controller.
- Support for APIC, SMP, and 64-bit systems has been enhanced, allowing for the booting of a full Debian environment.
- Accumulated fixes have been included.
Source: opennet.ru
