A month of the Hurd: DDE linux26, thread storms, patches, new live CD and IRC meetings.

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.