Philip Charles, our 72 years old provider of Debian GNU/Hurd installation CDs has now resigned from that position. This has lead to a flood of public thank-you responses, and surely yet more of those have been sent privately. Phil, thanks again for providing the many installation images you've started producing nearly ten years ago! -- oh, the joy of (not) uploading CD-size images using a 56k modem... -- and that have been the first choice for many of us to get a Debian GNU/Hurd system installed.

On the other hand, there's no need to worry about these news: Jérémie Koenig got the Debian Installer for the Hurd into a basically working state; there is a simple four step installation guide. This brings us a big step forward towards easy installation of Debian GNU/Hurd and automated image creation. You can track Jérémie's progress on his user page.

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort also made progress with his Google Summer of Code work. For example, he posted a new iteration of his proposed changes to exec as well as he added support for sending file descriptors over Unix sockets. These patches add features and improve compatibility to other systems, and thus help to get more software packages to work as expected on GNU/Hurd systems.

Ludovic Courtès fixed make dist, which allows for easy tarball creation of the GNU Hurd sources.

We've been in the news last month -- and this month yet again: LWN posted a well-researched article on the status of the Hurd: Koen Vervloesem: The Hurd: GNU's quest for the perfect kernel.

A bunch of patches have hit the mailing lists and source code repositories:

Jérémie Koenig posted a preliminary patch to add initrd (initial ramdisk) support in GNU Mach for his Google Summer of Code 2010 project: Debian Installer. With this patch, and some other patches that are still in flux, he ended up being able to install a Debian GNU/Hurd system using the Debian Installer -- which is the goal of his project. Patches being in flux means that there's still work left to be done to properly solve some issues, so there's no need to worry that Jérémie wouldn't have any work left until the GSoC ends.

Karim Allah Amed came up with the first patch for porting the clustered paging-in code from OSF Mach to GNU Mach, which should improve the virtual memory performance of the Hurd.

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort got a bug in glibc fixed, which unblocks a problem we've seen in coreutils' ln, and also continued to make progress on other grounds.

Zheng Da began to commit patches to make his DDE project support block device drivers, apart from fixing some other issues, too.

Samuel Thibault fixed memory leaks in pfinet, which is the Hurd's TCP/IP networking unit. Even though that a crashed pfinet server will be restarted upon its next use, having it eat up all system memory is to be avoided, of course -- and is corrected with these patches.

Carl Fredrik Hammar submitted patches to improve the stability of the auth server (rendezvous port death / invalid rendezvous ports).

Lastly, if you haven't seen it already: Richard Hillesley has posted an article GNU HURD: Altered visions and lost promise that caused quite a bunch of discussion -- some of it valid and constructive criticism, some of it less so. If you want to come in contact with us GNU Hurd developers, there are numerous options to contact us!

Zheng Da reported on the state of his ongoing work of porting DDE linux26 to the Hurd, which is meant to improve the GNU/Hurd hardware support. The devices as emulated by QEMU and VMware already work fine, but he's still seeking help for testing on real hardware.

Sergio López published patches as well as readily-usable packages to prevent thread storms in ext2fs when synchronizing large pagers. This should improve system performance and stability.

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort and Sergio López developed further patches (for example: exec, tmpfs) to fix or improve the various internal Hurd servers, and discussed them with other Hurd developers.

Justus Winter created a live CD with an installation wizard in the spirit of the OpenBSD installer. He needs testers to help improve it.

Ludovic Courtès informed that he has added support for cross-building packages from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd to the Nix package manager, as well as doing continuous cross-building of the GNU Hurd itself, and glibc.

The regular IRC meetings for Google Summer of Code students, their mentors, and any other interested parties are continuing on Mondays and Thursdays, 10:30 UTC, as Olaf Buddenhagen reported. If you want to catch up, have a look at the #hurd channel logs.

As always in the Month of the Hurd, these news blurbs are only a selection of what happened in the last month. There's always more to be found on our mailing lists, especially bug-hurd.

The Arch Hurd folks keep making good progress: their count of available packages keeps increasing, and one of their team reported the first instance of Arch Hurd running on real hardware (and uploaded a photo as evidence).

Of course, our Debian port is still progressing, too: 66% of all Debian packages are currently available for Debian GNU/Hurd.

Samuel Thibault's fix got included in libxcb1, so X.org again works out of the box using a simple startx.

Philip Charles extended his offerings with an updated GRUB USB stick for booting Debian GNU/Hurd.

Carl Fredrik Hammar proposed a patch to faciliate debugging the startup of misbehaving translators.

Mainly thanks to Jose Luis Alarcon Sanchez, we now have a new QEMU image. It can be run with a simple qemu -hda debian-hurd-17042010-qemu.img.

Thomas Schwinge updated our glibc maintenance repository to a recent version, including a bunch of the patches from the Debian glibc package (and these are meant to eventually be submitted upstream). After a long break, he as well updated his toolchain cross-compilation script to the current source code packages, and added C++ support.

On to the Google Summer of Code 2010: we got three students working on the Hurd this year:

• Jeremie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault, will be working on adapting the Debian Installer to produce working Debian GNU/Hurd installation images so we can easily offer up to date disc-sets. (Details.)

• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, mentored by Carl Fredrik Hammar (who was a GSoC student in 2007), will be working on a task that may be perceived as less exciting from the outside, but yet is extremely valuable: fixing compatibility problems exposed by projects' testsuites. (Details.) For starters, he already got a glibc patch accepted upstream.

• Karim Allah Ahmed, mentored by Sergio López, will be working on tuning the VM Subsystem in GNU/Hurd to bring the virtual memory management in Hurd/Mach up to date. (Details.)

We'd be happy to see YOU sign up on our mailing lists (bug-hurd and debian-hurd are the main lists), and contribute towards making the Hurd usable for everyone, as written down in our mission statement. Perhaps one of the unassigned projects (outside of the Google Summer of Code context) from our project ideas list is fit for you?

This month saw bugs dying as they met hackers like Jérémie, Samuel, or Zheng, Thomas, or Jakub (keeping it to a few ones which were discussed on the bug-hurd mailing list).

Olaf, Thomas and Fredrik wrote and submitted our organization application for the Google Summer of Code 2010. However, Google is asking most GNU projects to work under the GNU project umbrella, so we aren't listed as an organization on our own, but instead will again participate as a subproject of GNU.

Anyway, this organizational detail is not at all important for interested students; you can apply for any of the ideas that are listed on our project ideas page (or come up with your own ideas, of course!) via the GNU project GSoC page. If you apply, please also include the information we're asking for on our student application form. Don't hesitate to contact us beforehand, if there are any questions. We're looking forward to seeing your applications, please send them in before 2010-04-09!