The hottest and most promising operating system kernel in development, the GNU Hurd, has published another summary of its most recent quarter of development. Hurd has experimental support for 9pfs now, a work-in–progress port of OpenNTPD, the NTP daemon from OpenBSD, a port of Neovim, and a few more ports here and there. Diving deeper into the actual kernel itself, there’s a major improvement to how the Hurd handles entries in /dev/ :Mikhail Karpov added some checks for mmap in several places. Currently the Hurd sets device entries in /dev/ statically. For example, I am writing this qoth on a Hurd machine that is using two /dev/ entries for my filesystem: /dev/wd0s1 for swap and /dev/wd0s5 for my root filesystem.