The GNU Project has announced a major milestone: native 64-bit support for GNU Hurd is now available through GNU Guix.

If you are not familiar with it, let me shed some light. GNU Hurd is the kernel of the GNU operating system. Unlike the Linux kernel, however, Hurd uses a microkernel design based on GNU Mach. Core services run as separate user-space servers that communicate through message passing. Launched in the early 1990s, Hurd has remained largely experimental.

For decades, GNU Hurd was limited to 32-bit x86 systems. The absence of x86_64 support restricted its use on modern hardware. But not anymore. With 64-bit builds now available in Guix, Hurd can run natively on current x86_64 systems.