After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support , it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline " The 64-bit Hurd is Here! " GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development.

The GNU Guix developer blog announced the headline today of 64-bit support. The GNU Guix distribution with Hurd rather than the Linux kernel is now available in an x86_64 flavor for those wanting to try it out. The post also outlines other progress made to GNU Hurd with the Guix distribution over the past year and a half.

There have been many fixes throughout for GNU Guix/Hurd, including to the installer. 64-bit Hurd is booting successfully and there is now an installer option for Hurd on x86_64.

While some may be excited over GNU Guix/Hurd, there is still a very limited subset of packages successfully building:

"In Guix only about 1.7% (32-bit) and 0.9% (64-bit) of packages are available for the Hurd. These percentages fluctuate a bit but continue to grow (both grew with a couple tenth percent point during the preparation of this blog post), and as always, might grow faster with your help.

So while Guix GNU/Hurd has an exciting future, please be aware that it lacks many packages and services, including Xorg."

The GNU Guix blog post concludes talking about Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support that " so most probably we'll have 64-bit multiprocessing real soon now! It seems however, that we will need new bootstrap binaries for that. "