The developers of the Hurd project have announced a significant milestone in the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution. They have ensured the possibility of assembling 71% of Debian archive packages, up from 58% last year. Among other achievements in the GNU/Hurd project, they have successfully ported the MACH nucleus for the Aarch64 architecture and adopted patches that allow the use of GCC to assemble GNU/Hurd programs for AARCH64. While the port does not yet offer full functionality, it can already be used to launch simple applications. Additionally, experimental support for symmetrical multi-seating (SMP) has been implemented in the core of GNU MACH. Assembly problems with the use of GCC 14 have been resolved, and support for the Rustc compiler has been added to collect applications written in Rust.
The Debian GNU/Hurd distribution combines the GNU/Hurd core and remains the only active Debian platform built on a nucleus other than Linux. While the port of Debian GNU/KFreeBSD was previously developed, it has long been in an abandoned state. GNU Hurd is a core developed as a replacement for the Unix nucleus and is designed as a set of servers that operate on top of the GNU MACH microkernel, implementing various system services such as file systems, network stacks, and file access control systems. The micro-gnu Mach provides an IPC mechanism used to organize the interaction of the components of GNU Hurd and build a distributed multi-threaded architecture.