Philip Charles has released the K16 snapshot of the Debian GNU/Hurd system. This is the 16th update of the K-series Debian GNU/Hurd installer and marks the first major update of Debian GNU/Hurd since the K14 snapshot released in November 2006. The K16 CD series includes a mini-ISO, 4 full CD images, and 2 DVD images. For the first time, a QEMU image based on the mini-ISO is provided as well.

The QEMU image automatically boots GNU/Hurd and has networking setup so one can conveniently explore Debian GNU/Hurd without having to install or intially configure anything. The announcement has further details.

The K16 snapshot is the first to feature TLS (Thread Local Storage) in GNU Mach, the GNU Hurd's pthread library and the GNU libc, thanks to the implementation and bug fixes by Samuel Thibault and others. In order to update from the earlier pre-TLS snapshots like K14, users should read the upgrade instructions. K16 also fixes some major installation problems users reported with K14.

The GNU Mach microkernel has seen numerous bug and crasher fixes as well as improvements like support for MMX and other processor features and an improved kernel debugger.

K16 further features Qt3 and Qt4 library packages for the first time, thanks to porting by Alfredo Beaumont and Samuel Thibault. Other important new packages include emacs22, postfix, bind9 and libsdl. Major upgrades include glibc-2.6, gcc-4.2 and xorg-7.3. Currently roughly half of all Debian packages have been built successfully on Debian GNU/Hurd and are available though apt-get or similar package management tools.

The K-series installer has been developped by Philip Charles based on the old Debian boot-floppies installer, and uses Debian GNU/Linux. It partitions, formats and mounts the desired GNU/Hurd partitions and then installs the base system on them. After a reboot into Debian GNU/Hurd, the system installation is finalized.