The developers of the GNU/Hurd project presented reporton recent achievements and the current status of the project. Among the recent achievements of GNU/Hurd:
- The Debian distribution GNU/Hurd provides the ability to build 75% of packages from the Debian archive (in 2023 this figure was 58%).
- The port for the x86_64 architecture has been stabilized, the formation of Debian packages for x86_64 systems has been ensured, porting to ARM64 systems has begun.
- Initial support for SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing) has been added.
- The support for drivers in user space has been improved by using the mechanism developed by the NetBSD project rump (Runnable Userspace Meta Program).
- User-space drivers for SATA/USB drives and network adapters have been prepared.
- USB and TCP/IP stacks running in user space have been implemented.
- Assembly of packages with Xfce, GNOME, KDE, llvm in Debian GNU/Hurd has been provided.
- Added support for go, rust, ocaml, ghc, java.
- The Guix/Hurd distribution has been created with the ability to use the GNU Hurd kernel (x86_64-gnu) instead of the Linux kernel.
- Projects have started to create variants of the Arch and Alpine distributions with the GNU Hurd kernel.
GNU Hurd is a kernel developed as a replacement for the Unix kernel and designed as a set of servers running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel and implementing various system services, such as file systems, a network stack, and a file access control system. The GNU Mach microkernel provides an IPC mechanism used to organize the interaction of GNU Hurd components and build a distributed multi-server architecture. The distribution Debian GNU/Hurd combines the Debian software environment with the GNU/Hurd kernel and remains the only actively developed Debian platform based on a kernel other than Linux (a port of Debian GNU/KFreeBSD was previously developed, but it has long been abandoned).