News about Debian GNU/Hurd
June 10th, 2023
Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 released!
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the
release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2023.
This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the stable Debian
"Bookworm" release (June 2023), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an
official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.
The installation ISO images can be downloaded from cdimage in the NETINST and netboot Debian flavors. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. The easiest way to run it is inside a VM such as qemu
Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with about 65% of the Debian archive, and more to come!
- APIC, SMP, and 64bit support was improved a lot: they now do boot a complete Debian system, but some bugs remain to be fixed.
- The rump-based userland disk driver seems to be working fine now, we can now boot a system without any Linux driver in the mach kernel: mach then only drives the CPU, memory, clock and irqs!
- Many fixes, including some important security fixes.
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ (or its latest version), and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd in the past. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or the other. Thanks everybody!
August 14th, 2021
Debian GNU/Hurd 2021 released!
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the
release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2021.
This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the stable Debian
"Bullseye" release (August 2021), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an
official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.
The installation ISO images can be downloaded from cdimage in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, or DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. The easiest way to run it is inside a VM such as qemu
Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with about 70% of the Debian archive, and more to come!
- The port of go is complete
- Support for file record locking was added
- Some parts of experimental APIC, SMP and 64bit support was added
- Userland IRQ delivery was reworked
- An experimental rump-based userland disk driver was introduced. This means dropping the Linux glue from the GNU Mach kernel is getting very close!
- Many fixes, including some important security fixes.
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ (or its latest version), and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd in the past. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or the other. Thanks everybody!
July 7th, 2019
Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 released!
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the
release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2019.
This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the stable Debian
"buster" release (July 2019), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an
official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.
The installation ISO images can be downloaded from cdimage in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, or DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. The easiest way to run it is inside a VM such as qemu
Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with about 80% of the Debian archive, and more to come!
- An ACPI translator is available, it is currently only used to shut down the system.
- The LwIP TCP/IP stack is now available as an option.
- A PCI arbiter has been introduced, and will be useful to properly manage PCI access, as well as provide fine-grain hardware access.
- Support for LLVM was introduced.
- New optimisations include protected payloads, better paging management and message dispatch, and gsync synchronization.
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ (or its latest version), and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd in the past. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or the other. Thanks everybody!
June 18th, 2017
Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 released!
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the
release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2017.
This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the stable Debian
"stretch" release (May 2017), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an
official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.
The installation ISO images can be downloaded from cdimage in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, or DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. The easiest way to run it is inside a VM such as qemu
Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with about 80% of the Debian archive, and more to come!
- The core GNU Hurd and GNU Mach packages were updated to versions 0.9 and 1.8, respectively. Besides numerous other improvements, they bring vastly improved stability under memory load and prolonged uptime.
- The native fakeroot tool has been greatly improved, allowing to be used for building packages, making that quite faster and safer.
- It is now possible to run subhurds as unprivileged user, thus providing easy lightweight virtualization.
- The supported memory size was extended beyond 3GiB.
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ (or its latest version), and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd in the past. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or the other. Thanks everybody!
April 25th, 2015
Debian GNU/Hurd 2015 released!
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the
release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2015.
This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the stable Debian
"jessie" release (April 2015), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an
official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.
The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, or DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. The easiest way to run it is inside a VM such as qemu
Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 80% of the Debian archive, and more to come!
Since the last snapshot release coinciding with "wheezy", the init system has been switched to sysvinit for a more Debian-like experience. Further changes since the last snapshot include:
- The core GNU Hurd and GNU Mach packages were updated to versions 0.6 and 1.5, respectively. Besides numerous other improvements, they bring vastly improved stability under load and prolonged uptime.
- The networking drivers were migrated to user-space drivers using the NetDDE framework and a Linux-2.6.32 codebase.
Notable new or upgraded packages which required considerable porting effort and/or are known to work well on Debian GNU/Hurd include Iceweasel 31 ESR, Xfce 4.10, X.org 7.7 and Emacs 24.4.
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ (or its latest version), and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd in the past. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or the other. Thanks everybody!
May 21st, 2013
Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 released!
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the
release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013.
This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the Debian
"wheezy" release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an
official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.
The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, or DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.
Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.
We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or the other. Thanks everybody!
June 11th, 2011
Various bugs of the debian-installer based image were fixed, there is no
known issue except that GNOME and KDE are not installable yet.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
February 15th, 2011
The debian-installer based image was updated to squeeze d-i packages.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
September 1st, 2010
A debian-installer based image is available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
October 19th, 2009
The L1 DVD images are now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
December 21st, 2007
The K16 CD images are now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
November 19th, 2007
The K15 CD images are now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
November 27th, 2006
The K14 CD images are now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
April 26th, 2006
The K11 CD mini image is now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
October 26th, 2005
The K10 CD and DVD images are now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
May 14th, 2005
The K9 CD Images are now available.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
December 30th, 2004
The K8 CD Images are now available. These Images support Filesystems bigger
than 2 GB and feature an update of the network device drivers.
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
March 6th, 2004
After a long time of not being updated, new CVS snapshots of the Hurd and GNU Mach are uploaded.
July 31st, 2003
The K4 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
April 30th, 2003
The K3 CD images are now available.
They have been renamed to GNU-K3-CDx.iso
See the Hurd CD page for further information.
March 6th, 2003
The K2 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
October 10th, 2002
The J2 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
Upgrading Debian GNU/Hurd from a libio-based system before 2002-08-12 (including J1 CD series).
Updating a Debian GNU/Hurd system in August 2002 requires to follow the procedure outlined in the upgrade manual. This update procedure is necessary because the Hurd interfaces went through an incompatible change to prepare support of long files.
August 5th, 2002
The J1 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
February 26th, 2002
The H3 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
December 15th, 2001
The H2 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
November 11th, 2001
The H1 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
October 5th, 2001
The G1 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
August 7th, 2001
Today is the first time we crossed the 40% mark in the statistic about up-to-date packages per architecture.
July 31st, 2001
The F3 CD images are now available. See the Hurd CD page for further information.
July 12th, 2001
Marcus Brinkmann has made available his presentation about the hurd. It is currently available from:
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/talks.en.htmlNovember 1st, 1999
Cleaned up some outstanding bug reports which were closed by now. Going to upload some more packages, in addition to those uploaded in the last days (inetutils, grub, man-db, now coming hostname, mtools, ...). All those now compile without any changes, which is a good thing. Seems we are slowly stabilizing the basic set of packages.
September 29th, 1999
There are patches to glue Linux character devices into GNU Mach now. These patches are very experimental, and the tty driver does not work correctly with the term translator, but we are working on it and hope to be able to provide a binary soon. Note that this will bring the Linux console to the Hurd (including color and virtual consoles), as well as drivers for various non standard mice and other serial devices.
I heard that some people are concerned about the size of GNU Mach, as well as it becoming a subset of Linux. Please note that we are only searching for a temporary solution here, until we have the time to redesign the driver interface in GNU Mach (or use another Microkernel). The microkernel is not at all that important as the Hurd servers are which run on top of it.
On the package side, we have now a proper shadow package
(which produces passwd (thanks, BenC!)). Also,
man-db should work out of the box now even with long
filenames, but I haven't checked the other changes. All in all, the
base section is getting into a good shape. Torin has applied my patch
for perl, and that's another package I have to check out
if it can be `finalized' now.
August 31st, 1999
debianutils 1.12 does now compile without patch.
August 5th, 1999
Source NMU for passwd (shadow) should fix
all remaining problems in this package. This should make for a
smoother install. On the other side, mutt requires a
small patch.
July 27th, 1999
New packages of the core system are finished now. The Hurd has a new
way to boot (the part that happens after init is started), take a look
at /libexec/runsystem. This is useful for the
sysvinit package, which is almost done. Fixed a buglet in
GNU Lib C and one in GNU Mach. Autodetection of all network cards
should work now, but maybe we need to tweak the order a bit (3c5x9
before 3c59x).
July 22nd, 1999
cpio 2.4.2-25 fixes the remaining Hurd compatibility issue
and can now be compiled without changes. Thanks Brian!
July 5th, 1999
Perl 5.005.03 patches submitted to the maintainer. The upstream code was already clean (thanks, Mark!), but the Debian packaging scripts were linux specific.