diff --git a/en/projects/summerofcode.sgml b/en/projects/summerofcode.sgml
index dcc0089ff3..63e1421a61 100644
--- a/en/projects/summerofcode.sgml
+++ b/en/projects/summerofcode.sgml
@@ -1,427 +1,395 @@
-
+
%navincludes;
%includes;
%developers;
]>
&header;
The FreeBSD Project is excited to take part in the Google Summer of Code
2006. This project endeavors to fund students to contribute to
an open source project over the summer break.
Example Proposal Ideas
In addition to the student project ideas listed below, the FreeBSD
Project maintains a list of general projects looking for volunteers here.
Userland / Installation Tools
- Integrate BSD Installer: Prepare a prototype
merge of the BSD
Installer as a complete replacement for the venerable FreeBSD
sysinstall program. Enough of the groundwork has been laid out now
that someone with a few months and some background could do a lot
of good work here, especially with adequate mentoring by more
senior FreeBSD developers.
- Bundled PXE Installer: It would be great to
have a bundled PXE installer. This would allow one to boot an
install server from a FreeSBIE live CDROM on one box, set the BIOS
on subsequent boxes to PXE boot, and then have the rest happen by
magic. This would be very helpful for installing cluster nodes,
etc.
- Fully Integrated SNMP monitoring: Plugins for
our BSNMP pieces to monitor elements of system state such as load,
disk space, VM statistics, entropy, firewall rules and states,
sendmail queues and accepts/rejects, and the like. An SNMP client
that could pull and centralize the data gathering, render it,
etc. &a.philip;, &a.glebius;, &a.harti;, and &a.rwatson; are
coordinating.
- Integrate Xen Support: Support for the Xen virtual
machine monitor is coming into FreeBSD -CURRENT, so the
installer could be updated to make it possible to setup a Xen
system with several FreeBSD nodes, etc.
- Rewrite CVSup in C: CVSup is the CVS-Optimized
General-Purpose Network File Distribution System. It has been
used heavily for nearly 10 years to distribute the FreeBSD CVS
tree to mirrors around the world. CVSup was written in Modula-3
and a rewrite in C would encourage more users to improve it.
CVSup is a multi-threaded application by design so the applicant
should have at least some experience with pthreads.
Additional requested features include understanding of Subversion
fsfs repositories and Perforce depots. Currently part of the work
and research has already been completed. More information on this
project is available here.
&a.mux; is the coordinator.
- Improve our regression testing system: Nik
Clayton has written a regression test infrastructure using Perl.
More of the regression tests should be made to work with libtap.
There are two main parts to it. First, many of the existing tests
should be moved from using assert() to using ok() and friends from
libtap. Second, more regression tests should be written.
Students familiar with scripting languages and software testing
are encouraged to work on this. &a.nik; is the coordinator.
- Tracking performance over time: One of the major
issues in a project the size of FreeBSD is monitoring changes in
performance characteristics over time. Doing this requires several
things. Those include a suite of appropriate tests, hardware to run
the tests on, a database to store results in, and software to
extract interesting results and display them. Solving the whole
problems is probably beyond the scope of one summer's work, but an
interesting subset should be manageable. &a.brooks; is the coordinator.
Filesystem
- inode versioning: Introduce an inode version
number into UFS, so we can store inodes in different formats. As
an example of how to use this, introduce a new inode format that
has a 32 bit link count field. &a.dwmalone; is the
coordinator.
- Autofs: Create the autofs filesystem from a
specification. Candidates should have some filesystem knowledge
and network filesystem knowledge. Most of this work is done,
however kernel transport and interaction with the "amd"
automounter needs to be completed. &a.alfred; is coordinating.
- Logical Volume Manager
- Magic Symlinks: Implement magic symlinks.
Candidates should have some filesystem knowledge.
Experimental
patches
exist against 4-STABLE, though the DragonFly implementation using the
setvar utility should be examined.
&a.jwd; can coordinate.
Networking
- IPv6 stack vulnerabilities: Review the last few
years worth of IP stack vulnerabilities. Check that these have been
fixed in the IPv6 stack too. Fix ones that haven't been fixed. &a.dwmalone; is the
coordinator.
- IPv6 feature parity: Review new features that
have been added to the IP stack (hostcache, TCP MD5 checksums,
...). Check if these include IPv6 support. Implement if it
hasn't. &a.dwmalone; is
the coordinator.
- Network Disk Device: Add the ability to
remotely access devices from one system to another. The goal is
to allow remote access to resources such as disks, sound devices,
and other miscellaneous pieces of hardware over the network.
Prospective candidates should have an understanding or interest in
remote procedure call systems, networking (TCP/IP), an interest to
learn how Unix device drivers work as well as process management
will be required. This project would be a good resume builder,
but is not for the faint of heart. &a.alfred; is coordinating.
- NFS Lockd (improve semantics): Improve the
semantics of the NFS lockd in FreeBSD. Apple has made certain
enhancements that can be leveraged in our code base. Implement
state recovery in the lockd. Candidate would learn how to port
code from one kernel to another as well as how to maintain state
on the client side. This would be a good resume addition. &a.alfred; is coordinating.
- NFS Lockd (kernel implementation): Improve the
semantics of the NFS lockd in FreeBSD. Moving the lockd
implementation into the kernel provides several key performance
and semantic improvements. Candidates should have a good
understanding of NFS, locking, RPC and kernel networking. This is
a great resume addition, providing you want to be saddled with
"knowing NFS" for the rest of your career, it is not for the faint
of heart. &a.alfred; is
coordinating.
- - Userland/kernel interface cleanups (net/if_var.h):
- Over eight years ago, the network interface headers
- were split into net/if.h and net/if_var.h. The intent was for
- net/if_var.h to be kernel only and net/if.h to contain public
- interfaces. Today, the internal header, net/if_var.h is still
- included in many userland applications. In some cases, this is
- due to interfaces that are not in fact kernel internal. In other
- cases, these structures are being used in conjunction with libkvm to
- access kernel information directly. This project would correct both
- classes of problems, primarily rewriting the netstat(1) command and
- any other network related libkvm consumers to use alternate
- interfaces, creating those interfaces if needed. Netstat's
- coredump analysis features would likely be split into a separate
- program. &a.brooks; is
- coordinating.
-
- - Web100 port to FreeBSD: The Web100 project was created to
- address the problems of TCP performance over long-fat network
- pipes. They created an interesting set of tuning and monitoring
- patches for Linux which enable significantly better performance
- in this area. Integrating this work into FreeBSD could provide
- significant benefits in terms of TCP performance in certain
- environments. The features of Web100 need to be mapped into
- appropriate FreeBSD abstractions and integrated into the
- system. The performance impact of these changes would have
- to be quantified before the changes could be introduced. An
- ideal candidate for this task would have some knowledge of the
- operation of the TCP protocol and familiarity with kernel
- interfaces. &a.brooks; is
- coordinating.
-
Security
- SecureMines: Add meta-data to the
system in order to trap intruders and provide an audit log. The
goal of this project is to create several means of marking an
event as a foreign act (such as opening a trap file) which halts
the system and provides as much information as possible,
possibilities include using extended attributes to tag such
"mines". Candidates should have an understanding of the Unix
process model. &a.alfred; is coordinating.
- SEBSD: SEBSD is a port of NSA's SELinux FLASK/TE
security model to the FreeBSD operating system using the TrustedBSD MAC
Framework. Right now the system is highly experimental, and a great
project would be for one or more students to spend the summer taking it
from an experimental prototype to something that can be actually used.
This might include the development of policy, integration of SEBSD into
the installer components, adaptation of userland components, sample
deployments, documentation, and so on. Candidates will want some
background in access control technology, especially mandatory access
control; experience with alternative security models would be a plus, as
would a background in OS development. However, there's room for a
range of work here, and all proposals will be considered! &a.rwatson; is coordinating.
Kernel
- Generic Input Device Subsystem: Some work has
been done in Perforce that begins to replace the ancient
psm->moused->syscons codepath into something more pleasant.
There's still a lot of duplication between psm and moused, however
and even more work is necessary to get syscons to be happy with
the new world order. &a.philip; is coordinating.
- Update the Linuxulator: FreeBSD provides Linux
binary compatibility through a Linux system call table that is
invoked when Linux ELF binaries are executed. This implementation
should be compared with an up-to-date Linux Kernel so that
important missing syscalls can be added to ensure that all
mainstream applications continue to work on FreeBSD. The student
should be able to read and understand foreign C code, write C
code, and have a good understanding of how to do a clean room
implementation of GPLed code (no copy & paste!).
- Implement passive cooling in ACPI thermal: The
cpufreq interface should be used to cool the processor, based on
the various _PSV settings. Also, we need to implement variable
polling intervals for thermal zones based on both the passive
settings and polling explicitly specified in the ASL. This
project requires good knowledge of C, an understanding of the
hardware/software interface, a laptop that works with ACPI, and
kernel awareness. &a.njl;
and &a.bruno; are
coordinating.
- Suspend to disk: Implement a suspend/resume
from disk mechanism. Possibly use the dump functions to dump
pages to disk, then use ACPI to put the system in S4 or power-off.
Resume would require changes to the loader to load the memory
image directly and then begin executing again. This project
requires good knowledge of C, an understanding of the
hardware/software interface, a laptop that works with ACPI, and
kernel awareness. &a.njl;
and &a.bruno; are
coordinating.
- Implement and profile various algorithms for
powerd(8): Implement a range of predictive algorithms
(and perhaps design your own) and profile them for power usage and
performance loss. The best algorithm will save the most power
while losing the least performance. Requires basic C knowledge,
laptop supported by cpufreq(4) (suggest newer Pentium-M CPU), and
some statistics. &a.njl;
and &a.bruno; are
coordinating.
- Kernel meta-language: Develop a dialect of the
C language that simplifies the task of writing kernel code.
It should include language extensions that make it
possible to write kernel code more cleanly and with less bugs. An
example of this would have language support for linked lists,
to obviate the need for messy MACROs. &a.gnn; and &a.phk; are coordinating. A Wiki
with more information is available here.
Additional projects may be found by browsing the FreeBSD Development Projects page or by
viewing some of the recent Developer
Status Reports.
Mentors
If you are interested in working on a project not explicitly
mentioned above, you may want to contact one of the potential
mentors below about writing a proposal in one of the following broad
categories.
If your project is not selected for funding by Google, but you
still think you have a feasible project proposal, then please email
proposals@FreeBSD.org.
Proposal Guidelines
Students are responsible for writing a proposal and submitting it
to Google before the application deadline. The following outline
was adapted from the Perl Foundation open
source proposal HOWTO. A strong proposal will include:
- Name
- Email
- Project Title
- Benefits to the FreeBSD Community - a good
project will not just be fun to work on, but also generally
useful to others.
- Deliverables - It is very important to list
quantifiable results here e.g.
- "Improve X modules in ways Y and Z."
- "Write 3 new man pages for the new interfaces."
- "Improve test coverage by writing X more unit/regression
tests."
- "Improve performance in FOO by X%."
- Project Schedule - How long will the project
take? When can you begin work?
- Bio - Who are you? What makes you the best
person to work on this project?
Frequently Asked Questions
Am I eligible?
Please see the Google Participant FAQ
for all questions about eligibility.
When is the proposal deadline?
Please check back soon for the proposal deadline.
What projects were completed successfully by students
last summer?
Please see the 2005 FreeBSD
Summer of Code page for a list of the completed projects
from last year.
&footer;