The Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 distribution is released, combining the Debian software environment with the GNU/Hurd kernel. The Debian GNU/Hurd repository contains approximately 65% ββof the packages of the total size of the Debian archive, including ports of Firefox and Xfce. Installation builds are generated (364MB) for i386 architecture only. To get acquainted with the distribution kit without installation, ready-made images (4.9GB) for virtual machines have been prepared.
Debian GNU/Hurd remains the only actively developed Debian platform based on a non-Linux kernel (a port of Debian GNU/KFreeBSD was developed earlier, but it has long been abandoned). The GNU/Hurd platform is not among the officially supported Debian architectures, so Debian GNU/Hurd releases are built separately and have the status of an unofficial Debian release.
The GNU Hurd is a kernel developed as a replacement for the Unix kernel and designed as a set of servers that run on top of the GNU Mach microkernel and implement various system services such as file systems, network stack, file access control system. The GNU Mach microkernel provides an IPC mechanism used to organize the interaction of GNU Hurd components and build a distributed multi-server architecture.
In the new release:
- The package base of the Debian 12 distribution is involved.
- A user-space disk driver based on the rump (Runnable Userspace Meta Program) mechanism proposed by the NetBSD project has been brought to readiness. The proposed driver allows you to boot the system without using Linux drivers and a layer that launches Linux drivers through a special emulation layer in the Mach kernel. The Mach kernel manages the CPU, memory, timer, and interrupt controller when loaded like this.
- Support for APIC, SMP and 64-bit systems has been improved, which made it possible to boot a full-fledged Debian environment.
- Backlog fixes included.
Source: opennet.ru