Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 Released

Following this weekend's release of Debian 12.0 , the Debian GNU Hurd port has been released that rather than utilizing the Linux kernel is making use of GNU Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 has been released as an unofficial release for this Debian variant relying on GNU Hurd rather than the Linux kernel. It's akin to the since defunct Debian GNU/kFreeBSD that formerly provided the Debian user-space but with the FreeBSD kernel. In the Debian GNU/Hurd case it's even less practical due to the many limitations of Hurd and its primitive hardware support.


Given the Hurd limitations, Debian GNU/Hurd is mostly practical in VMs.


Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for i386 and can build around 65% of the Debian archive. Since the prior Debian GNU/Hurd release, APIC, SMP, and 64-bit support has improved a lot but is still a work-in-progress. The rump-based userland disk driver has also been improved and there has also been many fixes.


Debian GNU/Hurd has improved a bit over the past decade since last time testing it but is still very much limited and niche compared to Debian GNU/Linux.


More details on the Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 release via GNU.org .