A month of the Hurd: Arch Hurd, FOSDEM preparations and a thesis on mobile Hurd objects.

This month, we saw the first booting version of an Arch Hurd system, which seconds the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution that already provides two third of the Debian software archive compiled for GNU/Hurd.

Nine Hurd developers will meet at FOSDEM 2010 on February 6th and 7th in Bruxelles, Belgium. On Sunday, Olaf will be giving two presentations in the Alt-OS Developer Room: Why is Anyone Still Working on the GNU Hurd? (10:30), and Porting KGI graphics drivers from Linux to GNU Hurd (13:00). The day before, on Saturday, Bas will be giving a talk about Iris, his new kernel (18:00, Embedded Developer Room).

Carl Fredrik Hammar finished and presented his thesis Generalizing mobility for the Hurd and passed with distinction. Congratulations! Its abstract reads:

The GNU Hurd features mobile objects in its implementation of filesystem backing stores. This thesis investigates the limitations and security concerns these objects present, and how they can be overcome. This is done in preparation for new applications that feature mobile code and mobile objects. In addition, one such application is studied and implemented, in which mobile code is used to make the ioctl system call more extensible.

So, when are YOU going to do a thesis, or another project on a GNU/Hurd-related topic? Contact us if you are interested!