GNU Hurd Has Been Making Progress On Its x86_64 Support

It's cool to see people still messing with GNU Hurd. I assumed it was abandoned.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Not only that, its been largely x86 limited but during Q4'2023 the developers involved have made progress on x86_64 support and begun tackling AArch64 porting.

Developer Samuel Thibault shared that the GNU Hurd 64-bit port now has enough packages in the debian-ports archive to be able to bootstrap a chroot.

This means that while the buildd will be ready, I'm really not at ease with letting it start, knowing that it can behave erratically.

Bootstrapping a chroot is working but the reliably building of packages for 64-bit Hurd remain an ongoing issue but a proc leak was discovered in the process.

I last tried out a Debian GNU/Hurd setup a decade ago in a VM and that still seems to be the way to go overall given the limited modern hardware support.

So there's still progress on GNU Hurd being made now into 2024, but it's still a slow affair and the x86_64 support is at least inching closer to a usable state.

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