GNU Hurd Has Been Making Progress On Its x86_64 Support

While GNU Hurd predates the Linux kernel, its hardware support has been woefully behind with very limited and dated hardware support compared to modern PC/server hardware. 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. A 64-bit Debian + GNU Hurd build daemon is getting setup and the other infrastructure work is coming along. But Samuel noted:

"Building packages is not very stable. I have been trying to build gcc-13 for a couple of weeks, without success so far. There are various failures, most often odd errors in the libtool script, which are a sign that the system itself is not behaving correctly. A way to reproduce the issue is to just repeatedly build a package that is using libtool, sooner or later that will fail very oddly.

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. When I built the initial set of packages for debian-ports (~100 packages), I got something like 5-10 such failures, that's quite high of a rate :/"

Published this week is the GNU Hurd news for Q4'2023. That news entry went on to note there are "many people" working on Hurd's 64-bit support. 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.

That quarterly news also noted that the project has been working on setting up continuous integration (CI) testing, various application porting work is ongoing like for web browsers, and a port to AArch64 also began. Another developer is also working on porting GNU Mach to POWER9.

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.