@bugaevc yeah! It took me quite a while to figure out a nice way to use gcc-14 for the Hurd while keeping the default (currently at gcc-11), avoiding a world rebuild (and probably worse, many subsequent package breakages that would need to be addressed).
It also took some time to figure out why my cross-built executables kept segfaulting, in the end just some tags were missing from upstream (and I hadn't carefully looked at which versions #debian was using).
Also, even the 20240825 debian image does not boot with qemu-8.2.2 for me.
Very thankful for all the kind help that I got, again!