GNU Hurd’s 64bit port progress, porting started to Aarch64, POWER9

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.

Michael Larabel

In addition, work has started to port Hurd to POWER9, and someone is working on bringing the Ladybird web browser to Hurd, for a more modern browsing experience, among many other points of progress.