A month of the Hurd: Debian Installer, clustered page-in, and a bunch of bug fixing.

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!